I’ve sung the praises of Dreamhost because of the quantity and quality of features they provide. And the price is certainly right.

So it’s been frustrating to find that the performance and reliability of my Dreamhost service has left much to be desired. Noting some really show page render times on this blog, I ran “top” to see if I could find something. Observe:

What this shows is that on a machine with 4GB of memory, 3.80GB is taken. That’s a problem. With literally dozens of customers running any number of processes, that means that pages are swapping out like crazy, meaning some pretty awful performance. It’s no wonder that we’ve got page load speeds of 8+ seconds.

So what’s the alternative here? I could switch my service but that would be hugely inconvenient. I’ll be contacting Dreamhost to talk about the situation but I’ve not got a huge amount of hope that my plight will receive much concern, what with me being on the bottom floor plan.