[M5Hosting] Planned Upgrade - Shared Hosting Customers - 6/17/06 22:00 PDT

[Michael J McCafferty]

Dear Happy M5 Customer,

         Part of being a good hosting company is knowing what is 
going on with your systems. To stay on top of everything, we monitor 
and measure everything we can. In addition to bandwidth and various 
other network metrics, we monitor various metrics on our 
infrastructure systems. Some examples of these metrics are total CPU 
utilization, CPU utilization in different modes (waiting for I/O, 
"system time", "user time", interrupts, etc.), memory in 
use/free/buffers/cache, load averages, disk space, number of 
processes running, and several others. All of these metrics are 
gathered every 5 minutes and plotted on various graphs. This allows 
us to see trends, predict failures and identify anomalies when they occur.
         Over the last few months CPU utilization on our Shared 
Hosting  server "witt.m5hosting.com" has increased. While we have 
received no complaints about performance, and the CPU utilization on 
the system is nominal by industry standards for a shared hosting 
platform, we have detected periods of time (a few hours at a time) 
when the load is higher than we'd like it to be. This is mostly due 
to an increase in the use of database driven web sites on this server 
and the use of dynamic content generated by PHP or Perl or other 
scripting languages.
         To address this, we are upgrading the CPU in this server. 
The expected increase in performance for CPU intensive work is 20% to 
40%, or a corresponding decrease in CPU time during periods of  high 
demand. At this time we will also upgrade the Linux kernel, and 
inspect the heatsink fan and other internal components to make sure 
they are ready for another several months of uninterrupted service.
         Dedicated Server customers will not be affected by this maintenance.


Who:            All Shared Hosting customers with IP addresses in the 
range of 209.216.206.134 through 159
What:           CPU upgrade, hardware inspection, kernel upgrade
When:           Saturday 6/17/06 after 22:00 PDT
Duration:       Less than 1 hour


         If you have any feedback or questions relating to this 
maintenance, please drop us a line at support[at]m5hosting.com

Thank you !
Mike

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Michael J. McCafferty
Principal, Security Engineer
M5 Hosting
http://www.m5hosting.com

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