A better option is just to ditch Wordpress and use Pelican. It can import your Wordpress blog automatically and is ridiculously fast (static HTML only). Plus you can now do your blogging using Vim and Git . Much nicer.

http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.1.1/



Sounds to me like the new nodes are getting hammered with all the migrations. I'd expect it to calm down somewhat once this huge mass of migrations has finished. I'd imagine it is putting quite a load on their internal network and the host machines IO in particular.

I had exactly the same issue post-upgrade, opened a support ticket and had a new migration to transfer to a new machine within 10 minutes, haven't had a problem since. I think I'm back on the old hardware (but with the increased RAM), but I wasn't CPU bound anyway - and it's better than completely unusable like it was post-migration.

[quote="Guspaz"]It doesn't help that linodes now have 8 virtual cores, not sure what the reasoning behind that decision was. Even though the core count is doubled on the new hosts, it would have probably reduced contention.[/quote]

This reminds me of when using VMware (I know it works a little differently than Xen, but here goes:)

We constantly had "discussions" between the network group (in charge of the VMware infrastructure) and the Database admins. The DBAs wanted more cpu cores for their systems (and more RAM) while the network group wanted less cores (RAM was understandable in this situation). To quench the issue a test environment was setup with both configurations, and the DBAs were asked to test the machines. It turned out that the less CPU cores had better performance than the full cpu cores. (6 cores vs 2 cores on a host with quad 6 core xeon processors). The issue in VMware was that all "requested" cores must have an available cycle before the host would give the guest the requested cpu cycles. So with 2 or 4 cores, it got the cpu cycles needed quicker than with 6 cores.. (with multiple guest machines on the system, only difference was the DB machines)... so... at least with VMware "more is not always better".

Xen isn't stupid like that, though.

Edit: Xen may or may not have other interesting performance issues, but it 100% does not have that one.

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

I was more suggesting that the number of threads involved was a bit nuts. Assuming each linode represents 8 threads on the host machine, and that there are still 40 linodes per lowest plan host machine, you've got a 16-core server managing 320 threads (virtual cores), or 20 virtual cores per real core.

Now, that's no worse than when we had 40x4 threads on 4x2 real cores but there was an opportunity to reduce the contention there (by doubling the real core count and keeping the virtual core count the same at 4 per linode).

I'm saying I'm not sure what the point of doubling the virtual core count was.

It was marketing and because this change could be made without buying extra hardware.

I doubt there were many people who were CPU bound before the upgrade.