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.