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Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity

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Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity
I have just been informed that the forum on my site has been shut down by our host due to their claim that it was hogging the majority of the CPU time on a shared server. I have been told that I have to move to a dedicated server which I cannot afford.

My question is just how CPU intensive is Gossamer Forums? I have four individual forums with 550 registered users and around 6000 posts in 7 months. This works out to about 25 posts per day and there are ususally no more than 7 to 10 simultaneous users.

There is only one recent incident that I can think of that may be causing a problem. Recently, I tried to install the "Poll" plugin. I thought I made all of the script changes recommended in the installation guide. However, it never worked. The script mods are still there, since they did not appear to cause any damage. Could this be the cause of increased CPU usage or is Gossamer Forums just a CPU intensive application?

Regards

Don McRitchie
Webmaster
Lansing Heritage Website

Last edited by:

warc1: Mar 11, 2003, 3:55 PM
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Re: [warc1] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
I'm having sort of a similar problem with my host using a shared server. The forum itself isn't taxing the server and we transfer about 10 GB a month, but ... I tried to delete messages over 60 days old recently (about 10k) and nothing happened. I called the host and they said that the forum was sucking up so many resources that the server was getting ready to shut down. GF checked and told me that the host has resources and timeout set so low that I might never be able to delete things. I even so far as to go out to 156 days where there were only 33 messages to delete and still couldn't preform the function. It's very frustrating because, like you, we aren't ready to move to a dedicated server. It's a forum run on donations and until our membership at least doubles, we wouldn't consider moving. But ... the real problem is that we are going over our allocated storage linit and may never be able to recover. It's very frustrating!

Steve

Visit The Guitar Diner
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Re: [warc1] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
You should consider putting your forum on a mod_perl enabled server. That considerably lowers the server load, because perl and the necessary modules are kept in memory all the time, and don't have to be loaded every time a request is made.

There are, however, not many hosting plans that offer mod_perl on a shared server. Gossamerhost (http://www.gossamerhost.com) does offer shared mod_perl hosting, their prices are reasonable, and the setup you get is super-fast. You will not regret it!

PS: I do not get commissions from GT for recommending them. The reason that I am recommending them is that they host my websites, and I am a very satisfied customer.

Ivan
-----
Iyengar Yoga Resources / GT Plugins
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Re: [yogi] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
I just looked up the GT server plans and they would appear to be beyond my means. My current host charges $30/mo for 500MB storage and 15GB transfer. GT quotes $125/mo for 500MB storage and 12GB transfer.

Regards

Don McRitchie
Webmaster
Lansing Heritage Website
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Re: [yogi] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
Hi,

At 125$/mo we could easily have a dedicated server with more than 50GB per month (just a quick search on the internet confirms that). I really don't undertand why the price of GT hosting are so hight. Unsure I would love to be hosted by them but not at that price.

François
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Re: [Franco] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
Quote:
At 125$/mo we could easily have a dedicated server with more than 50GB per month (just a quick search on the internet confirms that).

And at $125, any host offering 50GB is likely to go out of business.
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Re: [Paul] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
For $99/month I found this:

Intel Celeron 1.3GHz
512 MB RAM
60GB (7200RPM) Hard Drive
400 GB Monthly Transfer!

I sent you the URL throw a PM.

Last edited by:

Franco: Mar 12, 2003, 8:04 AM
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Re: [Franco] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
Yeah, they are easy to find, but I wouldn't trust them if my life depended on it. I've learned the hard way. If it looks like a great deal, it is probably not.
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Re: [warc1] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
Hi,

Our experience has shown that for most ISP's any spike in CGI traffic that causes them to get alerted to a problem, they will blame the script. i.e. if a spider hits your site and requests 30 pages in under 5 seconds, that can put a strain on a server and slow things down.

It's no more CPU intensive then any other forum. And for large forums, it's significantly better then most as the queries are heavily optimized.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Franco] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
Hi,

The shared hosting is high because we limit our shared servers to 15 accounts per machine to guarantee that your applications always have the power they need. We are also the only hosting company that supports mod_perl on shared accounts (where mod_perl can be preinstalled, running on a separate port, managed and monitored!).

That said, we are getting ready to release a major update to our hosting packages and will probably be improving our plans. Expect to see details in the coming month.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
Well our ISP pulled the plug on our forum for good yesterday. I had convinced them to put it back up after originally shutting us down two weeks ago to ensure that it wasn't a one time glitch. They claim they monitored the CPU usage generated by "forum.cgi" and stated that it remained extremely high. They also claim that they host vBulletin and UBB boards with no such problems. Anyone have any suggestions, or am I off to another forum package?

Regards

Don McRitchie
Webmaster
Lansing Heritage Website
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Re: [warc1] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
If it was Gossamer Forum I expect there would have been a lot more complaints by customers.about CPU usage.

This could even be down to your hosts perl configurtion but their knee jerk reaction will always be to blame the script.

You would need to track down the exact cause of the high cpu usage to have any sort of chance of solving it - maybe there is one function that is causing the problem...who knows.
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Re: [Paul] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
I can certainly believe that Gossamer Forum has higher CPU usage that many other forums. It's a result of the way it has been designed, by extracting and making functionality fairly generic in order to allow easy modifications to the program without actually modifying the program - namely, the plugin system. One of my v2 goals is to whatever necessary to reduce this time under CGI scripts. To give a comparison, the time taken on my computer for a CGI execution of the main category list page is around 200ms, while under mod_perl the time is under 40ms for a request. Obviously, this is dependent on many things, such as my version and compilation options of Perl (mine tends to be slower than most as I compiled Perl with threads support, which is known to slow down Perl as a whole).

The specific heavy time areas under CGI are: 1) Loading the various modules (about 90ms), and 2) Loading the compiled template files (about 60-70ms). Both of these are effectively eliminated under a persistent environment such as mod_perl - loading modules happens only one, at load time, and the compiled template files are cached in memory, eliminating the need to recompile them. There are other areas that mod_perl improves performance as well - for instance, DBI connections are preserved, thus eliminating the possible overhead of establishing a database connection.

Indeed having a very speedy, CPU-light forum requires the use of a persistent environment. If your host provides mod_perl hosting, then it is undoubtedly the fastest solution when compared to PHP or CGI scripts. The next fastest is going to be mod_php - if your host provides this (which is usual for PHP-supporting hosts), then Perl CGI, then finally PHP CGI.

Have you investigated the possibility of running Gossamer Forum under SpeedyCGI? That should give you most of the improvement benefits of mod_perl, and does not require root access to the server for either execution or use. The procedure is fairly simply - install SpeedyCGI, then change the #!/usr/bin/perl line at the top of gforum.cgi to #!/path/to/speedy. Or, for users performing a fresh install with SpeedyCGI, simply specify /path/to/speedy as the value for the path to perl asked during the installation.

Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com
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Re: [Jagerman] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
If someone was given ftp and CPanel access, what would they charge to do the speedycgi install?
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Re: [shiner] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
I was just given a quote of $75 ... being the code moron that I am, I need folks to charge me ... or find someone with more pity and skill that would do it because I'm a nice guy!

Visit The Guitar Diner

Last edited by:

Boomer: Mar 31, 2003, 9:02 AM
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Re: [shiner] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
Do you have speedy cgi already installed and you are looking for someone to install Gossamer Forum or do you need someone to install speedy cgi?
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Re: [Paul] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
Paul,

mod_perl is on this server, but I can not get it to work as a sub-account. When I instructed rackspace techsupport to add the proper code to the httd.conf file - the entire server crashed. So, we abandoned that as a solution for now.

speedycgi is not installed on the box, but from what Jason said, you do not need root access to accomplish this. My forum is already installed, I would just like to install speedy-cgi and point g-forum to it.

Thanks.
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Re: [shiner] Gossamer Forum CPU Intensity In reply to
I can help you out if you are interested. If so, just send me a pm and I'll get back to you.