Image by chucks via Flickr

I’ve just installed Zemanta, a blogging tool which suggests pictures and links to enrich blog entries.  It bases it’s suggestions on the written content with comparisons to similar content published by other sites and bloggers. Actually seems to be quite clever.

I’My posting rate is not very high at the moment as I’m busy with a lot of business projects, but when I do this will be useful.

Dreamhost are brain dead for some things – like recommending wp-cache, but breaking wordpress when it is used.

[emptysands@smithers:~] w
 20:48:51 up 26 days, 19:59,  6 users,  load average: 24.71, 20.75, 13.89
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

… 30 minutes later …

[emptysands@smithers:~] w
 21:26:52 up 26 days, 20:37, 10 users,  load average: <strong>558.90</strong>, 537.18, 406.38
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

before they finally get the reboot actioned. They use filers and the diskio was low:

[emptysands@smithers:~] vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 3 217 766800 280684   4668 176616    0    1     8     2    9     9 54  8 35  2

so it was maybe a rouge process. Not sure exact what the details are yet, I’m sure Dreamhost will post them in due course.

From. Photo Matt.

Dreamhost either have reduced their memory limit tolerance for processes, they use a php5.cgi rather than mod_php system. Or something strange has happened to my install set to trigger some issues. In fact even with all the plugins deactivated, I still need to move the plugin directory away in order to access the front page.

Strangely enough they suggested I use wp-cache, but after some testing I discovered this is the very plugin that is causing the problems. I’m working though this at the moment, but the blog should be back.