Posted by zfactor on September 28, 2010 at 4:02pm
Hi folks,
A client of ours just migrated their Drupal site to a shared hosting service and now experiencing performance issues with logged in users. Drupal's caching and APC are enabled, so content is loading fine for anonymous users. We are mostly running into issues with node add forms and administrative pages loading very slowly.
Has anyone run into similar issues migrating a site from a dedicated server to shared hosting? How did you improve performance on your site?
Comments
how shared is shared?
When you say shared hosting - if it's something like Dreamhost or a 'grid service' account with Media Temple - that means a shared database as well. That's typically where I see the biggest issues for performance. You can try modules like Boost and setting caching on views, but the best compromise I've seen in hosting is a 'dedicated virtual' server like Media Temple's '(dv)' offering. That's a virtual machine, but you have root access and dedicated MySQL database service. I had a site take a bit of a pounding with about 30,000 referring visits yesterday from a media site and it performed really well. Over a year tho cost difference isn't so bad (about $500/yr for a DV account). You really do get what you pay for in these instances.
That's my experience anyway...
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Similar experience with Media Temple offerings...
...I tried MT's gridservice for a while but it was far too slow and went down for maintenance often. Their dv offering was a clear step up and has been stable and the performance has been reliable for my sites, granted these sites don't typically get big traffic spikes. And I still have room to throw memory at it before I need to look at a change in architecture.
Excuse me?
For $500 a year I would expect a dedicated server.
Nancy Dru
Where have you found
Where have you found dedicated servers for $40 a month?
I just saw that Alchemy is
I just saw that Alchemy is offering dedicated servers with nice specs for $69 a month when paid a year in advance. $89 a month otherwise.
Apparently, this is the company that handles infrastructure for part of DreamHost's operations.
Moving from a dedicated
Moving from a dedicated server to shared hosting is likely to have a significant negative impact.
Node add forms and administrative pages are very query-intensive, so if they are slow it is likely that the shared hosting has too many clients trying to connect to the MySQL database at once.
The main way to mitigate the pain is just to disable unneeded modules.