Why is pacman so slow - here's why!

Kim Schulz, tuesday d. 18. december 2007

In the past few weeks the popular pacman google gadget has gone from slow to down to slow to now being back to near normal. I have received thousands of mails from people that wanted to know what happend to the game. Today I decided to tell why.
Since 1997 I have had my domain www.schulz.dk hosted at the same company. From the start I have paid for the "big package" with free disk space and free trafic. Since then the original (and really great) company, Image Scandinavia, has changed owners several times and over time the support and QoS has become worse and worse. First i became World Online, then Tiscali, then Tele2.
Tele2 is actually an ISP and their hosting is taken care of by the company uni2. Usually Uni2 have been known as one of the most reliable hosting sites in Denmark, but in my experience that isn't really correct. Over time my site was really slow and database access could sometimes give timeouts.
Recently Uni2 was aquired by TDC Hosting which is the hosting company of the largest tele and internet provider in Denmark.
Now things started breaking down since their admins apperently did not like the fact that my site was so popular.
One evening they suddenly changed the read-access bit on my pacman files without any prior warning.
I noticed that and thought it was a glitch in their system so I changed it back to normal. A few hours later, all my files were locked down by the evil "root".
I contacted their support and a guy there told me something along the lines of "sorry we cannot hos your file anymore, they are too demanding. We have to other customers to think of too".
How the h... can the largest hosting company in Denmark not handle my site. It's not that popular and we are only talking 75-100Million hits/month giving around 800gb-1tb/md traffic.
I would think that this kind of hosting would be a minor thing to them.

The solution
In the end, I could not persuade them to host the pacman game - however the rest of the site could stay if it "behaved well".
Fortunately I own my own small hosting company where I decided to place the pacman game on a separate server.
I started by setting it to be ready for extreme high load, but in the end I realized that the caching system, reversed proxy etc used up more system resources than the actual webserver load.
So in the end I moved the game to a small virtual server that runs as a 2ghz machine with 2gb ram. The avg load is around 1.2 (unix load) and less than half of the ram is in use.
Now I ask myself even more why the large hosting company could not handle this kind of load. Seems to me like somebody in their admin team should take a look at their setup.
Final Note
I would like to thank everyone that have supported me by sending friendly mails and game ideas. Also a big thanks to everyone that plays this game and makes it one of the most popular games on Google ever.

---

Permanent url: http://www.schulz.dk/en/blog/blogarchive/110

Want your own image next to your comment? Join Gravatar.com - it's free!