Digg vs mediatemple – Round 2 – Starring GPUs and wp-cache
Posted by Jon Lee in Site stuff, tags: digg, GPU, mediatemple, wordpress, wp-cache
Yet another Digg! This time on the previous post, “Hindsight is 20/20“. As of now, there are over 3,700 diggs on the story, and although the server is holding up fine, the two diggs within the week really took a toll on my GPU count.
For those of you that don’t know, mediatemple tracks individual server resource usage with a unit called the GPU or Grid Performance Unit. Here is mediatemple’s description of it:
A GPU is a measurement that derives from CPU time required by every single hit/request made to your (gs) Grid-Server service. This includes your web server activity, programs, scripts and all associated parent and child processes across all nodes within our system (100′s of processor cores). The GRID system keeps track of all the measurements taken from your server and adds them to a running total which is calculated every 24 hours.
This GPU restriction only apply to their cheapest plan, the Grid Server hosting plan. Each month, you get 1000 GPUs, which is supposedly equivalent to 10% usage of a processor core continuously for a month. This sounds like a lot right? And it is… until you get dugg that is.
After being dugg twice in a week, I have used up over 700 (seven hundred) GPUs for the month of February. To put this number into perspective, last month when I had no diggs, I used a whopping total of TWO GPUs. If I get dugg again, I will definitely go over the allocated 1000 and will have to pay overage fees (10 cents per GPU).
One thing I’m very thankful for is installing and activating the wp-cache 2 wordpress plugin beforehand. What wp-cache does is create a static version of your posts to serve to users who access your site. The cached page is updated at a specified time interval (or manually). Without this plugin, I reckon I’d be way way over my GPU limit (and thus also be out a good chunk of dimes).
Anyway, here is the Google Analytics chart of the digg effect. May have to upgrade to the Dedicated-Virtual hosting soon… or stop writing posts that get dugg :S
PS. I know I mention mediatemple a lot… maybe they’ll give me free hosting or cut me a deal? *crosses finger*
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