We’ve ran into an interesting problem since launch and that is no one uses very much CPU. I suppose it’s a great problem to have but when we’re trying to get a decent idea on usage and if our system is well done. The misc. usage users have is very low we’re seeing maybe 0.10 per day. This includes anything that runs as the user so PHP, Perl, Ruby and anything cPanel may run as the user as well. We can live with the low numbers on that though there at least it’s showing people something granted much lower than we expected. Now MySQL usage is the more interesting one as it’s going to provide far more confusion.
MySQL usage has to be tracked as integers as the MySQL build we use to do this tracks as such. It would be great if that was not the case but it is so what we’re seeing is users not even using any CPU according to their panels. That could potentially lead to confusion among users as even if you used 0.99 until you reach 1 you’re going to actually still have 0.00 reported. Now we could stop tracking usage by day and reset it more often so maybe they’d eventually hit the usage we’d want. This though increases overhead and would no longer provide daily usage to users who use enough CPU for it to matter.
I guess in the end it’s not working as well as planned at least for low usage users. If we had higher usage users whom are the people we’re targeting the CPU usage statistics at it would show it’s real use. The plan from the start was to show the high usage users yes you’re using a lot here’s our system saying so. We’ve just had the luck to have people who are receiving 20 visitors a day and not 10,000 that would show up as a significant amount on our servers. I guess it just shows you the majority of users using unlimited hosting or any shared hosting for that matter use nearly no server resources. It’s a few users who are costly for the web host and it’s the low usage users who are paying for that usage as using 20% of a servers CPU is a lot when you think about how many users on a server.