So I’ve officially switched my hosting plan from Dreamhost to Media Temple. I wrote in my personal blog about how I was considering getting the “Grid Server” plan.
Basically, the gs is supposed to protect your site from things like the digg effect. They say:
The Grid’s on-demand scalability means you’ll always be ready for intense bursts of traffic and the growing audience resulting from your online success.
Now, the only way to actually test this claim is to get dugg. So let’s see if Media Temple isn’t full of hot air and stress test this baby! Digg the story here.
Here’s what the blog is running on:
WordPress – 2.0.5
PHP – 5.1.6
MySQL – 4.1.1
For the purposes of this test, WP-Cache is off.
So if this site does get dugg, and people have to resort to using the digg mirror, I guess the grid’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.
EDIT: So this finally hit the digg front page. Let’s see if the server can stay up. I think the diggers are up for the challenge…
Also, I don’t think I’ll be making any money on ads by doing this, since Digg users are usually not the type to click on ads. But hey, while I have your attention, check out Notecentric: For sharing class notes. It’s also on the same server and running on the 64mb rails container. Somehow I don’t think that could handle the load (I’d probably need to upgrade to at least 512MB of dedicated memory). But we’ll see!
EDIT 11:16PM: So the traffic has gone down considerably since the page hit the front page of digg. It’s on the second page now. The server seemed to do fine, besides the occasional database error here and there. Most people wrote saying that if they refreshed, it would work. Thanks to everyone who helped to “test” the server. You did a really good job of keeping track of how many diggs/how slow the server was at any given time.
So some people also think this is just a big commercial for Media Temple. That wasn’t my intention, but if you think that mt is a good host, then all the better. You can totally sign up using the referral link and it would help me pay for my own hosting. I suppose I could have mentioned it upfront, but I don’t think that would have kept people from complaining about it anyway.
Someone asked if I used all of my “GPUs.” I’m not even sure that Media Temple is showing its customers how many they use yet. At least, I haven’t found any way to check. I’m sure they’ll approve of my experiment once I explain it to them. I hope.
84 replies on “Moving Hosts: Stress Test”
You’re currently at 82 diggs, and I’m still able to post this content…
121 diggs, and still looking fine!
At 113, you are(your blog, more accurately) still surviving, just kinda slow.
Hmmm, it looks like the site is still running pretty well. People are saying it’s slow, but it seems okay to me…
Took 44 seconds to load at 10:19 pm est.
Took awhile for it to load, with 189 diggs.
Took 14 seconds to load.
Ctrl F5 took 33s to load the page completely at 179diggs.
Subsequent F5s took about 13s to load the page.
No issue from me. Cheers.
did not load for 30secs then instantly loaded.
You’re at 168 now and I was able to post this comment. 🙂 The page loaded a little slow but not bad.
-Dawn
Step Talk – Where Stepparents Come to Vent
Media Temple is lame. DreamHost.com provides better features, more disk space and they have rock solid servers. Media Temple needs to lay off the damn booze.
Slow as hell… but it’s still here (there).
~210 diggs and took ~45 secs to load
As others have said, at first my browser hung as if it were going to time-out, then the page finally loaded after 30 or so seconds. Now to see if this comment makes it…
Can’t believe I’m using a Stopwatch for this…
253 diggs, using Firefox v2.0
Ctrl F5 = 24s
F5 = 17s
Cheers.
It took only 3s for it to load for me. Right now there is 150 diggs, and this is on the front page.
Ive survived diggs, farks, even a slashdotting on a tuned 1u single cpu running the same setup (PHP,WP,MySQL, without caching). The box hosts about a dozen sites, mostly low traffic but, but the biggest has gotten over 20 million hits this month already.
That said, Ive never used Media Temple, & I wouldnt bad mouth them. Might be a nice place to work one day.
Good show the page loaded in maybe 20 seconds for me – 216 diggs!
283 Diggs…took about 4-5 seconds
231 Diggs and still working.
you’re being linked from BulletinboardForum.comm
post test….
304 diggs, bout 20 second load time for me ^_^
308 Diggs | 3 Seconds
well, its gettin pretty slow it seems to me. Not sure what your at for diggs, I want to say around 290, not sure. But, yeah, took about 20 – 30 seconds. I’m suprised the server can handle this, considering people are actually clicking it. I’d like to see what you are getting for hits. Other than that…. i hate your server (mysql sucks hard, as with wordpress). Cheers.
worked fine for me, and quick
Yeah .. George Bush really is an idiot …
400+ Diggs
4 Sec Loadtime from Singapore (200ms average ping to mediatemple) from here… Still good i see…
WordPress rocks, deal with it.
Anyhow, 319 diggs, the page did nothing for about 10 seconds and then loaded almost instantly.
Still alive.
Nice host you got there it seems.
384 Diggs, instant load (I was already here around 30 Diggs and it took about 30 seconds)
7 seconds from ASU University with ethernet
Your at 411 diggs and loaded perfectly fine for me,
well 396 diggs when I looked, the pages loads, slow, at least 20 seconds. but its running and — if your reading this posts are working
also your 64 meg ram server works too
420+ diggs, page loaded with virtually no delay.
Had trouble for a while an hour or two ago, but now it’s back up to speed. Seems like you’ve got a quality host 🙂
433 diggs and took me 24.172 seconds to load. A bit slow but still works.
Nice Nice… and what plan is this on?
456 diggs, still working fine 🙂
~454 diggs, instant load time for me – cool!
a bit slow @ 480… but works.
Loaded fine for me some 480 diggs in
Hello,
How many GPUs did you end up using? Are you still under the $20/month for the gs server?
It’s either slow as balls (over a minute to show anything) or barfs with a database connection error. L-A-M-E.
Have you considered that this one page is also calling 11 external hosts? (all of which may subject a page load to delays).
metrics.performancing.com – (6 external calls)
http://www.google-analytics.com – (1 external calls)
pagead2.googlesyndication.com – (3 external calls)
feeds.feedburner.com – (1 external calls)
http://www.lduhtrp.net – (1 external calls)
http://www.assoc-amazon.com – (1 external calls)
us.yesasia.com – (1 external calls)
s10.sitemeter.com – (3 external calls)
http://www.statcounter.com – (1 external calls)
c11.statcounter.com – (1 external calls)
www6.addfreestats.com – (1 external calls)
Wow…why do you have that many traffic monitors?
11:53 est and it loaded very quickly
Not dead completly. 532 diggs.
526 diggs. Page loaded a little slow but not too outside of the normal. Looking good so far.
537 Diggs and a 6 Second load time, I’m looking at switching all my stuff over first thing in the morning, my current host has started to bite it kinda hard with increased traffic to the site ( 200 concurent users = 20-30 second load times )
looks good to me
12 seconds; cox internet; 550 diggs
why don’t you try it with a page that actually has some content on it
the “digg effect” usually kills sites because they’re hosting several images/videos, or files that require lots of bandwidth
a 12kb page w/ 220kb of elements is not likely to be “slashdotted” any time soon
Also, is everyone here just stupid, or do they not realize that this is an Ad with basuguy getting referrals for everyone who clicks his MediaTemple link
12D 1U – 510 Diggs – 5-10s
But who is to say that Media Temple is not going to get a hold of this and boost your box? Then this is not so accurate.
You can’t boost a Grid server. Thats the point of this
Seems pretty quick. I was thinking about hosting a few Rails sites at MT to see how it goes.
Hey man I’ve been on the with mt for a while, the new gs servers are the shiznit. I love their new shit, glad to see you like the service!!
this site is so lame it makes me want to suck a dick
610 diggs and still going fine, although it did take 2.153 seconds to load.
I’m using a new Firefox plugin which measures all http requests and it seems those external links to the outside are killing his load time. I presume he’s making a grip right now from Google though.
22 seconds to load
A lot of that is probably due to the 3,291 analytics scripts you have. 😉
Hmmm, perhaps those external requests are mucking things up a bit. I used to be pretty stat crazy, but I guess I could remove some of them now.
Also, for people thinking I somehow work for Media Temple, I don’t. I wasn’t even sure that my host would’ve signed off on the whole idea of me asking people to kill the site with pageloads.
Sure that link is a referral, but if you found out about their digg-proof ness from my blog, why shouldn’t I not be able to refer you?
Really, my intentions were just to see if the site would go down when dugg, and for the most part, it did well. I’m pretty happy, since I have a feeling my dreamhost account would’ve died instantly.
Speed is fine. Didn’t slow down yet!
You’re at 635 diggs right now!
Ouch wasted your money. Took 30 seconds to load and about 10 mins after that it had db errors for a long time.
639 Diggs, loaded fine for me 🙂
At 600 diggs, it’s too early to say. Wait till you get into the 2000 diggs.
@651 digg, still alive…. took some 20 sec on ADSL, though
At over 600 diggs. Got a database error, but refresh and it loaded.
Now it’s loading very fast within 1 sec.
Have you used up 1000 GPU?
How can we tell?
679 diggs in, and it loads faster then the digg discusion about it.
Working.
it took 33.166 seconds to load.
27.875s
On Digg.com page #5 with 763 diggs.
26 second load time.
Not too great.
Yikes, I’ve got 4 (gs) accounts. Hmm.
Currently this post has been dugg 768 times, as of today. So I guess your assumption has been proven many times already.
I’m quite impressed. Honestly.
786 Diggs – around 15 seconds to load (again a big gap then comes up clean)
Ctrl F5 refresh – around 5 seconds.
I’d say that was a pretty cool test and proof of this new grid hosting. Interesting…
Ouch, 47 seconds … Guess MT’s grid is not that good after all …
Well, it seems like the gs system what not totally up to the challenge.
From their website “Dynamic, clustered scalability. Automatically grows to support any load level. Easily handle traffic spikes with the power of hundreds of servers powering your site.”
From what is up there, the “easily handle traffic spikes” somewhat does not include digg since some people had 45 secs. of delay.
Let’s hope that they will improve.
I just gave it a test and it took 47 seconds to get it to load (I’m on a t1).
It is 1:40 PM EST on the 31st and you currently have 820 diggs and are on the 4th page of digg (technology).
So maybe their cluster does work – maybe it takes 45+ seconds with our without big spikes?
Seems to have still loaded fine! I hate link bait articles I can’t get too when it sounds link something interesting.
Seems to be running great. Like some others said and I noticed; the traffic monitors took a some time to load on the page.
Still at 820 diggs and page loaded in 15.75 secs, with FireFox 2.0, running FasterFox add-on set to “Turbo”.
Phasers were set to “Stun”.
Wow,
So this is yet another test to see if we, (mt) Media Temple, are truly digg proof..i think we faired pretty well 😉
People refreshing your page and digging constantly creates a mock-DDOS attack btw. You certainly suffer from your external-calling links as EVERY time the page is reloaded, you’re calling your stat program and whatever other services you have hosted externally.
Hung..glad to have you on (mt)!
Cheers,
Jason McVearry
[email protected]
Well its probably 2 weeks after you performed this test and it took me 20 seconds for this page to load up in firefox on a 10meg lease line.
Not too bad from what i’ve been reading. Just hope that my host A Small Orange is as good!
Solid article, here’s a quick update with what I am finding with my Media Temple GS account. We’ve hit a few front page diggs and not only does Media Temples GS service handle the traffic, but our site also seems to speed up with all the traffic as the GS will load balance across multiple servers.
So that’s the good news… the bad news is that the GS hosting limits you to only 1000 GPU’s per month (which you can now monitor through your MT account center). My site uses a resource intensive WordPress theme and we’re now easily going over our 1000 GPU monthly limit half way through the month. So at 10 cents per GPU (when you exceed the 1000 limit) this takes our $20 hosting plan up to a couple hundred dollars per month. Ok, simple solution, upgrade to one of three DV services offered by MT (ranging from $50 – $150 per month). That was my plan until I called Media Temple and they informed me that since the DV hosting will not be able to load balance across multiple servers when needed, neither three DV options could probably handle Digg style traffic surges without slowing down or crashing the site. A media temple representative even recommended I look into their Nitro hosting option (which I believe is about $750 per month). I mean $20 per month to $750?
Not sure what I’m suppose to do now and, while I like MT overall, they have really failed to provide me with some solid guidance on this one, pretty disappointing. I would like to stay with MT, but really am not sure what to do now.
Any suggestions?
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