Gandi.net Groups

I've seen the same sort of problems. I know that a VPS solution demands
different expectations than a shared hosting environment, but the
performance here seems very poor. I'm using Gandi MI and I've been
through what seems like every aspect of my system configuration trying
to figure out why performance is so poor. Like you, I've ended up
putting it down to disk I/O.

I have a 2-share server that sits almost completely idle (CPU idle =
99.7%, plenty of free RAM, virtually no swap usage, very little disk
activity) and yet the load average spikes to 3.0, 4.0 or higher at
various times during the day for no apparent reason. That is to say,
there are sometimes 3 to 4 processes contending for the CPU at one time,
despite the fact that the CPU is almost completely idle. It's not just
metrics that suffer, of course -- loading static and dynamic pages from
my server is slower than with any shared host I've ever used. The only
explanation I can come up with is really, really bad disk performance.

The network infrastructure doesn't seem to be great either. The ping
times to my server are highly unpredictable. They'll be rock-solid at
80ms or 85ms 99% of the time, but the other 1% they'll be insanely high
(1900ms). Throughout the day there will be brief periods of time (30
seconds or so) where my server is completely unreachable. Bear in mind
this is on a server that receives almost no network traffic apart from
what I generate. This is also far from the first Linux server I've set
up, so I don't think there's a configuration problem at my end here.

I have a support ticket in about this, and I'll post here when I receive
a response. I really like Gandi's people and policies, but putting up
with bad infrastructure while waiting 48 hours or more for support
responses is very trying.