Originally Posted by cascadeclimbers
That's kind of a par for the course response from Dreamhost. Blame you first since you are the one complaining.

Yes. In this situation, it was difficult getting the web-side techies convinced that it was the database side. They kept pointing the finger at my site.

They replied to my first two complaints:
> I looked into the cause of your issue and it seems your scripts have been getting automatically killed by our Process Watcher script due to your sites going over Memory limits on the shared server

Then:
> The database server itself is stable and has been up for quite a while:

harp:~# uptime
14:40:53 up 182 days, 3:42, 1 user, load average: 8.04, 8.11, 17.47

I've checked the available logs for the daemon and there are quite a few
triggers so you definitely need to optimize your sites or consider moving
to a VPS.

I've checked today's logs and you have quite a bit of traffic today:

fir:/home/whitneyz/logs# for k in `ls -S */http/access.log`; do wc -l $k
| sort -r -n; done
61440 whitneyzone.com/http/access.log

You may not be using much software, but whatever you're running under your user account is indeed hitting the shared server limits. So you will need to optimize any scripts you're running to bring your usage under control.

The Process Watcher daemon works on a per user basis. If a user were to hit the shared server limits, their scripts/processes are killed and only their user is affect - no one else. So it's not an overloaded database server at all, but the processes/scripts you're running.

Following that I wrote:
> This problem is becoming unmanageable! There is SOMETHING outside of my
> website that is causing MySQL to run slower than molasses.

I got this back:
> I apologize for the trouble with your database service. We did identify a higher than normal load and had our admins get that resolved. It's looking much better now and I am seeing much faster connection times to the databases on that server. I do expect everything to continue running smoothly but please let me know if you see any further problems with this or need anything else.


I later responded:
The problem is STILL there!... Your MySQL database processor is broken!

And finally got the satisfactory result:
> I have identified a database causing issues with the SQL server harp and
after rectifying the problem the load has now dropped back down.



WhitneyZone -- Whitney Hikers Association