Welcome to My World

I’m simultaneously impressed and annoyed with DreamHost (current home of Willfe.com). Their control panel is top-notch, their flexibility is astounding (as I’ll discuss further a bit on in this post, I’m even permitted to roll my own PHP builds and shove a cache like APC behind it), and on the whole performance has been pretty good for shared hosting.

But it’s still shared hosting. Shared hosting means my domain lives on the same physical server as a few hundred other accounts, and quite possibly a few thousand other domains. DreamHost separates MySQL from web servers, so the database sits on another machine (two points of failure, yay!). This is a good-in-theory kind of thing — in practice, if the web server slows down, my site slows down; if the database server slows down, my site (and every other site that uses that database server) slows down which ultimately slows the web server down.

The bigger and much more irritating “feature” is DreamHost’s “process reaper,” which obeys some unspecified set of rules in hunting down long-running, CPU-hogging, or memory-hogging processes and killing them (we’re talking “kill -9” here, not a “hey you really need to stop now but I’ll give you time to shut down gracefully” kind of kill).

It’s not usually a problem (I’d rather see a rogue/slow PHP request get nuked than have it continue grinding away at nothing), except when it comes time to follow their own damned instructions to roll your own PHP build. Their sample scripts, which even invoke “nice” to make sure these processes only occupy idle time on the CPU, still end up getting killed. You can never actually build the damned thing with the scripts provided, because they intentionally remove older attempts to build the pieces that make PHP work. So if any part of the process dies, you get to start over. Yay.

What sucks about this isn’t having to do it by hand (I’m fine with that). What sucks is to actually get this accomplished, I have to hold its hand all the way through the process. I’m still using “nice” for this (since I don’t want to actually clobber anybody’s sites or bring pain to the server), but it just means I get to run “nice make” over and over and over again (make understands interruptions and will resume a compile at the spot where it died/got killed) until it’s all done.

The upshot of all this is, with a touch of luck (and a metric assload of patience), the site will ultimately run a bit faster, with all scripts running from an object cache instead of having to load, parse, and compile each time.

Cross your fingers, but if you cramp up, let it go for a bit. This will take awhile

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