Hi,
FyberOptic wrote:
I regularly experience very slow responses from my server, at different times, but usually daily at some point.
As do I on my Linode (at HE/Fremont).
Here's my story:
A regular daily sluggishness recently came to my attention when I set up a new cronjob on my local machine. The cronjob would initiate an SSH tunnel (local <-> linode) and then uucp any received mail to my local server.
I soon found that the 09:03 (UTC) job was failing each day (connection timeout) -- never a problem at any other HH:03 time.
By process of elimination I concluded that host load that was causing the failure (confirmed as "High" in the Control Panel). I was thinking of filing a support ticket -- to get Linode folk to try and resolve / limit the "other Linode's cron" somehow -- but decided to reschedule my local cronjob to HH:01. That worked around the "09:03" issue so I no longer get a failed connection attempt with the hourly cronjob; but the fact remains that my web/mail servers are extremely sluggish at that time due to host load.
FyberOptic wrote:
I might be expecting more usage out of it than what I pay for[.] ... It's only as of the last few months that it's been regularly crippled like this for me, and what my server runs has changed very little since then.
To partly echo FyberOptic -- and to phrase a couple of questions to Chris / Mike / Tom (AKA Linode.com):
Is it really the case that other Linodes will hog the shared resources from time to time and we just need to accept that situation?
Or can something be done? For example, some further product differentiation spread across hosts, like "Linode 100 Pro" and "Linode 100 Burst" -- the former's nodes gets less burstable CPU resources[*] but the assurance of host/node reachability at all times; the latter for people who amuse themselves with 'emerge -uv gcc glibc'

.
[*] I am assuming that CPU resource is the bottleneck; though it may be something else.
Regards,
Cliff