Determining Resource Usage

[Gimpy]

Greetings.

I'm not sure I understand how I go about determining the amount of resources my websites are consuming, especially in terms of CPU & SQL. External storage, as well as RAM usage, is pretty obvious in the Power Panel but what about other resources?

Parallels show that something like CPU usage .6% Avg CPU 0.07, 0.06, 0.01 but I have no idea what than means and it's constantly changing. Is that good, bad? What an I comparing it to?

My site is graphics/image intensive and the images load relatively fast, but not what I would consider blazing, by any means. What determines that? Is there some kind of throttling going on?

If someone could provide some clarity and tips on monitoring resources, it would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Dan]

Morning Gimpy,

Determining CPU usage for a domain can be pretty tough especially since the VPS could be doing something in the background that you may or may not see. In SSH you can run 'top' and it will show you current memory usage and CPU usage kind of like the task manager in Windows. The CPU usage that you listed (.6% Avg and 0.07, 0.06, & 0.01) are all very low.

SQL and hard drive space is easier, simply log into the account's cPanel and you should see it in the menu on the left.

If you have multiple accounts on your VPS it can be fairly difficult to determine memory usage for just THAT domain but if you have just the one account then obviously all of the system's resources are available for that account minus what the system needs to keep itself running of course

Graphic intensive sites always seem to load more slowly due to the fact that it's loading all of the graphics at the same time. And of course the rules of the internet always apply, the speed of your own connection and ISP, if there's a problem with a switch between you and the server having problems, etc etc. Knownhost does do throttling but it's like 10MB which is still quite fast and I would be very surprised if that was what you were seeing.

As far as monitoring resources goes you should get a daily email which will tell you if there are any blatant problems. You will also get an email from each user's cPanel if they get within certain thresholds of their limit like 80% of disk space and so on.

 

[Gimpy]

Thanks for the info, Dan. I'm an avid Fedora user so I'm very familiar with the top command.

I'm not really that concerned about the CPU usage of a given account. I'm more concerned about the overall CPU usage of the container, which I assumed was what I was seeing in Parallels and yes, it's very low.

Is that number the overall CPU usage of the container's slice of the CPU(s)?

Also, I requested the bandwidth be increased from 10Mbits to 20Mbits and that definitely sped up image loading. The most bandwidth I've ever used in a month is around 200GB so with 2500GB at my disposal, I have plenty of headroom there.

 

[Dan]

Hi Gimpy,

I'd have to say that is the whole machine's CPU. If software has become so advanced that it can essentially create a virtual CPU for each VM I'm not aware of it. Personally I have only logged into my Parallels panel like 3 times in the time I have had my VPS I always just use SSH and/or WHM.

We're talking about throughput not bandwidth here. The reason that they limit the throughput is so that if there is a DoS attack or something like that it doesn't completely take everything down.

 

[Gimpy]

I'd have to say that is the whole machine's CPU. If software has become so advanced that it can essentially create a virtual CPU for each VM I'm not aware of it.

Thanks for the reply, Dan. I have a cloud based account on another host, which displays the CPU slice and memory limits in the cPanel, for a specific account.

I was just wondering if something like this was available for a VPS container/account. It's not really a big deal, though. My CPU & Memory usage will be relatively low and won't need much monitoring.

Thanks again!

 

[KH-Jonathan]

This is probably because they're using CloudLinux which has some kernel-level enhancements to make this possible.

Unfortunately it's not possible to run CloudLinux inside of a Virtuozzo/OpenVZ environment due to these kernel modifications which are not included with and not compatible with the vz kernel.

 

[Gimpy]

Thanks for the clarification, Jonathan.