Those Media Temple GPUs
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So this site has been on Media Temple (mt) web hosting for a week now, and so far… I’d have to say it’s been going pretty well. The only thing that gave me a bit of concern during the first few days was GPU usage, which is basically (mt)’s way of measuring usage. Now I don’t think this site is really that popular, but I was somewhat surprised to see that the site was consuming GPUs at a rate of about 2 per hour. Which if left uncheck, would’ve quickly eaten up the monthly allotment of 1000 GPUs and probably incurred about $50 in overages for the first month (on top of the regular $20 / month hosting fee). If that was to be the case, I’d just move the site back to Dreamhost and use the 30-day money back guarantee (mt) offers, since I’m not about to pay $70 / month for web hosting.
Fortunately, I was able to identify some fairly inefficient scripts that I had running, and programmed some caching and other optimizations to help cut down on GPU usage (for example, this script). Now the usage rate is settling back down and looks like the site is going to end up using ~600 GPUs, which is not too bad I suppose, and leaves enough room for a digg or slashdot.
In all of this optimization stuff, I wrote a tiny utility script to automatically poll and log the GPU usage report, since (mt)’s usage report only displays total usage for the month. This basically allows me to graph the historical GPU usage by hour, and also project the predicted GPU usage over 30 days. If you’re interested in using the script for yourself (and know how to setup cron jobs, and customize PHP scripts), you can check out the parser class from SVN here.
PS, if you do decide to signup for Media Temple account, put down tantannoodles.com as your referrer. It’s not a coupon or anything, so it doesn’t do anything for you. But I would get a small credit for the referal, and I would thank you for it 
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8 comments
What type of traffic numbers were you getting that was causing your GPU usage to be so high? I’m thinking about switching to Media Temple and am curious about what it would take to reach the 1,000 GPU/month limit.
this little blog of mine is getting about ~2000 pageviews per day… so it’s not really that much…
I opened a new blog about two weeks ago, nowadays it is getting about 4500 pageviews a day (excluding the bots). It consumed about 25 gpu for the last 12 hours.
I was using stattraq plugin for wordpress which is a resource intensive plugin. I just deactivated it and hope it will decrease the gpu usage a bit. I’ll continue to monitor the gpu usage and let you informed.
Yeah, in the last 24 hours, this site has consumed 42 GPUs… which at this rate, would put me at ~1,200 GPUs, or about $20 in overages.
I’m redesigning my site, so please don’t judge me by that. I put you down as my referrer after seeing this a few weeks ago while searching for articles on how good media temple are. I’ve had no problems with them, but of course I do not have the visitor count and this load that your site does.
Thanks Paul!
Hi Joe - how’s the GPU usage on your site these days?
The reason I ask is that I’ve just finished my first month with (MT) and I’ve been (mostly) impressed. I checked my GPU usage today and it’s at 250 for the month; this is from a handful of low traffic Wordpress sites. It came as a bit of surprise. Now I’ve got to try to figure out what’s eating the CPU time…
This month, which is my second month is now about 930 GPUs. I’m going to go over for sure…. I was hoping the new MySQL grid container would help reduce it’s rate, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that… mostly just a a faster / snappier site, which is good too
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