Tech Note: Accelerando
Unlike the last one, here’s a tech note about something you will notice.
Today we were trying to figure out why LGF was responding very slowly, even though traffic was not especially high. At first we suspected the new installation of Mint, but Mint is not the culprit.
Digging around the web server with the top and ps commands, we discovered multiple instances of a process called ‘cpdavd’ running, using obscene amounts of processor time. Googling ‘cpdavd’ told me that this was the WebDAV background daemon, an extension that lets server administrators edit files remotely.
Well, we don’t use WebDAV and never have. It was enabled as part of the default virtual server settings when the LGF server was first provisioned. There’s no telling why it suddenly started spawning so many processes, but they had been running for about two weeks, wasting CPU cycles like crazy. So…
We killed all the cpdavd background processes, and used our Web Host Manager control panel to disable launching it. And watched as the server load instantly dropped from about 20 to about … 2.
That’s a huge difference, and it should be very obvious to all LGF visitors as the pages load much more quickly. So there’s our tech success story of the day.
Frank says: