Why do I have "excessive disk i/o usage" ?
 

Hi, I run two sites which until recently were on separate account on a shared solution. As one of the sites is really growing, and we more or less outgrew our shared solution, our host offered us a their cloud server platform. We move both sites (one large and one small) to the cloud server and have had nothing but problems every since. While the hosting company has worked with us to make things better, we are still having what appear to be random long pauses and even timeouts.

The hosting service finally told us tonight that the source of the problem is excessive disk i/o usage.

According to them, this was even an issue back when we were on shared hosting but the shared hosting solution was more or less able to compensate for it, but on the cloud server the problem is more obvious.

Here is the exact message we received.

Quote:
Upon further investigation it appears that the source of the problem is excessive disk i/o usage. On the cloud server platform, storage is not local but rather accessed over a network interface. The storage is still within the same facility, but as a result inefficiencies within the sites have become more predominant. Compared to other cloud servers we are hosting, the disk i/o usage in your server is quite honestly through the roof. This should not be happening with just standard vBulletin installations, so we feel that some kind of third party plugin is the cause here. Would you be able to investigate this on your side to see if any unnecessary plugins can be uninstalled to perhaps alleviate MySQL usage/queries?

The reason these problems were not as severe on the shared hosting platform is due to the use of local storage but it seems that even after migrating the iowait, which measures disk i/o utilization, has gone down by a considerable amount on the old server. Thus, it seems that there was always some kind of inefficiency, but it is just being highlighted due to the characteristics of the platform you are on.

My question is, what can we do about this? I don't know of any addons that we use that would be causing this issue.

One thing I have wondered about is that we force our members to upload signature images (as opposed to link them) and we strongly encourage members to upload attachments instead of link to images on external sites.

If anyone could provide some thoughts on where I could or should begin to try to find a solution for this problem, I would greatly appreciate it!

BTW, for whatever it is worth, my sites are:

www.therpf.com and www.thedentedhelmet.com. We are using MediaLayer for our hosting, a company therpf.com has been using with great success for years.

Thanks!