CPU Units

[ronnie68]

In the pan comparision for VPS accounts I came across the term CPU Units. Can someone explain what this is and how you determine how many units are available on a server. In my case it's the famous apollo server. Wouldn't this depend on the kind of CPU, speed, and number of CPUs?

The reason for asking is that I am running a site with few users but with some complex php/mysql pages and the server response time is almost always very slow (10-30 seconds). In rare times it gets down to 1-5 seconds.

The top command shows very little cpu activity during a page reload and available ram is normally low. I rarely reach 10% of the cpu load.

What can I do to improve the performance?

[Ron]

Look at your mysql database and indices and what you can do to simplify your queries.

When that's done, look at more memory perhaps.

Is your VPS paging to disk like crazy?

MySQL table scans (not a good thing usually) might run like the dickens in a shared environment where there's a ton of memory allocated to the MySQL server, but crawl when there's not enough memory and have to swap things out to disk.