Downloads are apparently non-functional, and I had to disable the forum cross-posting plugin yesterday because it was reporting a database error.

I am investigating.

Update: And now it appears I may need to disable the forum, again.

Mediatemple tracks two kinds of resource usage on hosted accounts: data bandwidth and “grid performance”, the latter of which roughly equates to the amount of time the server processor has to devote to the site. Or server processors, since the site is distributed over multiple servers. Performance is measured in “grid performance units” (GPUs):

A GPU is a measurement that derives from CPU time required by every single hit/request made to your (gs) Grid-Service. This includes your web server activity, programs, scripts and all associated parent and child processes across all nodes within our system (100’s of processor cores). The (gs) Grid-Service keeps track of all the measurements taken from your server and adds them to a running total which is calculated about once an hour.

Your (gs) Grid-Service plan is allocated 1000 GPUs each month. This is equivalent to continuously using 10% of a processor core for one month and breaks down to 1.4 GPUs per hour.

I’m currently sitting at 1465 GPUs over my monthly limit, a height to which my usage has never soared before…and the source of the problem seems to be the forum, specifically the control panel and posting scripts. Indeed, the forum accounts for 74% of the overage.

Which is odd, because the forum hasn’t seen a lot of legitimate use in the past while. Which leads me to suspect spambots may be the source of the trouble (they always did have an affinity for phpBB). So I think, for the time being, that I’m going to disable the forum to see if next month things are calmer.