Wednesday, April 23, 2008

DreamHost CPU Minute Restrictions

DreamHost is a popular web host among bloggers. With accounts beginning at only $7.95 a month, featuring generous disk space and bandwidth. But DreamHost's CPU minute restriction limits their otherwise generous bandwidth/storage allowance.

DreamHost measure server resource consumption in CPU minutes. This number indicates how much time a processor spends working for host user. All DreamHost shared hosting customers should use less than 60 cpu minutes per day for all their users on their account.

How to find the my CPU minutes per day, DreamHost tell us the way.

First, you'll need to verify that you have CPU Reporting enabled for your user. This can be done from the 'Users'->'Manage Users' section of the web panel by clicking 'edit' for the user.

You should be able to access your reports within a day after being enabled by FTP'ing or SSH'ing to your account and switching to the logs/resources/ directory. In there, you'll find files named .sa.analyzed.0, .sa.analyzed.1, .sa.analyzed.2. Your username will replace . These files are generated by a script that looks at how many minutes your scripts use, then rotates them every day. So the latest file from yesterday will be the .0 file, and the day before will be .1 and so on.

You can also view and download these stats files through the stats url of any of your domains (E.G. http://yourdomain.com/stats/resources )

You'll only really need to pay attention to the first column, the second column, and the total at the bottom. In the first column is the process name, or the file name. The second is the total CPU seconds per day it's using, and then the total CPU seconds after the dashed line. In this example, the top process is "view" with 6245.03 CPU seconds per day (or 104.08 CPU minutes per day if you divide by 60). The total for this particular day is 6767.95 CPU seconds per day, or 112.79 CPU minutes per day.