Dear Media Temple
I think that I’m going to start looking for a new hosting provider.
A robot over at media temple said:
Dear Jesse,
This is a courtesy notice to inform you that your (gs) Grid-Server’s GPU (Grid Performance Unit) usage for the current cycle is projected to exceed the amount included with your purchased plan.
— Current period: (01/24/2007 - 02/23/2007)
— Projected overage is: (77.00GPU)
— Purchased amount is: (1000.00GPU)
I went to check their online stats, and now they are projecting an overage of 139 nebulously defined “Grid Processing Units.”
Why not file a “support” request?
GPU usage
Are there any hourly or per-request metrics for GPUs? Unless I have fine grained reporting, I might as well be trying random optimizations when attempting performance. I turned off the heaviest queries in my gallery2, but apparently GPU usage is still going up.
They did respond quickly:
Currently there is no monitored service that will track you GPU usage hourly or in real time. We are working for a similar solution in the near future. You do however get an average of about 23,000 hits per weekday.
GPU’s are cumulative over the month — if you sustain that many hits CPU cycles will eventually add up and your GPU usage will continue to grow.
Random optimizations are a good way to go. Keep in mind stuff like queries to your database, cpu cycles consumed eventually adds up to 1 GPU. A large majority of our customers don’t even reach the 1000 GPU mark.
Really, who cares about real time response? Just put process id into the logs, and provide another log of cpu usage by process id. That wouldn’t be trivially easy for a user like me to arrange, but if they want to bill me for usage, they should be able to account for that usage.
How about a formula?
c1x cpu seconds of processing time + c2y queries + c3z cpu seconds of query processing time
where c1, c2, and c3 are published constants.
Irritated.
just write more.
(thinking, aren’t you)
If “a large majority of our customers don’t even reach the 1000 GPU mark,” and you have 1,077 projected GPUs for the upcoming month, this must mean you’re really popular. As a mother, I’m so proud!
Our account with Mediatemple is 6 months old. The first 4+ months we used a steady 400 gpus per a month. But over the last month somehow we are now pushing 1000+. Our traffic has increased 5-10% but other than we are running no additional scripts or anything that could be sucking down GPUs. I don’t know whether they are just making it up or what, I can’t find anything it could be. I’m even running WP-Cache now and it hasnt decreased our runrate at all and we will still have to pay overages after running 400-500 GPUs every other month. They have no tool for figuring out what a GPU is, what is burning GPUs or to allow you to do anything. And they have had their gridserver product out for 9 months now. Just disappointing.
It’s ridiculous, I had such high hopes for Mediatemple based on friend recommendations but now they are all apologizing for how terrible it seems to have become.
I too had high hopes for the Grid, but with frequent downtime, mysql not being reliable and now getting one of those “over GPU” nitices, I am hugely disappointed. I can’t see sticking with them much longer.