Tag Archives: cloud

on preventing amazon ec2 micro instance cpu throttling with cpulimit

back in april i moved snowdeal.org to amazon web service’s free tier to kick the tires. because who doesn’t love being a part time LAMP admin? ( i jest! ).

almost from day one i’ve suffered from outages when the virtualized cpu time would spike to 100% often after posting a link to twitter and facebook and all you lemmings followers follow it all at once or after an unruly bot would start hammering the web server.

as i suspected ( but didn’t know when i signed up ) amazon severely throttles the free tier microinstances if you consume more than your fair share of virtualized cpu cycles for more than a few seconds!

well, what good is that? not much. you get what you pay for and all that i suppose.

what’s a part time LAMP guy to do? install cpulimit and set maximum CPU consumption in percentage by any process!

“Purpose of cpulimit daemon:
Daemon runs in background and checks if some process is consuming more then 20% of CPU and if it does then daemon lowers CPU consumption of particular process to maximum of 20%. The goal is to have no single process that consumes more then 20% of CPU power.”

i installed it and i’m cautiously optimistic that it’s working as advertised but i’m sure it’ll need some futzing in the future.

something wicked this way comes.

something wicked this way comes.

driving slowly down a country road overloaded with black locust, a line of clouds appeared and i wondered if maybe things are going to get even trickier.

i was pretty sure a tornado was going to drop out of the line of clouds that stretched as far as the eye could see.

happily, no tornadoes appeared, but it did start dumping down rain which made unloading the wood even more fun!

now a vast intertwingled wasteland IN THE CLOUD!

after a long, long, long period of serious unreliability from my “hosting with a human touch” hosting provider who i’ve been with for more than a decade ( who apparently has decided to not answer emails but i’m not going to name names), i’ve moved the vast wasteland over to amazon web services on the hopes that i can get back to better than 50% uptime and, you know, when you click on a link it will actually work.

it was relatively painless getting things running in the cloud, but my LAMP stack admin skills are a little rusty so let me know if anything goes BOOM!

while i was futzing with my backend, so to speak, i took the opportunity to finally bring back the logo which got dropped during a redesign a ways back for mundane reasons. who knew it would take me a few years to bring it back. hi. ho.

and i took the opportunity to remind everyone, front and center in the header, just how long i’ve been doing the vast wasteland. intertwingled SINCE 2000! it never ceases to amuse me that after 13 years the vast wasteland is still in the top search results for the phrase coined by ted nelson to refer the complex of interrelations in human knowledge.

who knows, maybe i’ll even make an “about” page after 13 years.

update: right after i published this mysql crapped its pants. so we’ll see how this goes. might be a little bumpy while i tune things.