If you've ever encountered problems reaching my blogs one reason this has occurred on occasion has been run-away processes started by other web sites that are hosted on the same box. I've had to contact the hosting service Hosting Matters and alert them so that they could go kill those processes. Well, it looks like they've had to do this one too many times as a result of customers using Greymatter to run their blogs. Therefore Hosting Matters has banned the use of Greymatter scripts.

As of July 1, 2003, all Greymatter scripts will be banned from any Hosting Matters server. The reason is quite simple: the resources used by Greymatter can quickly spiral out of control, killing services. The problem with Greymatter is that the various pieces of it will not properly exit. This results in multiple gm* processes spinning and requiring manual termination. It also results in a continual upswing in CPU usage for just one site. The following is an example of one existing site we watched:

I cheer them for making this move. Servers shouldn't be getting bogged down by buggy software. If you are thinking about setting up a web log this report strikes me as a good reason not to use Greymatter. Perhaps now that a web hosting service has made such a dramatic move against the use of Greymatter maybe some hackers will fix the Greymatter scripts to prevent this problem from happening (and, then again, maybe not).

The Hosting Matters, Inc. Acceptable Use Policy and Service Guidelines now include a statement about Greymatter. Hosting Matters is not alone in taking this step. Scribehost bans Greymatter as well.

My own blogs are run with MovableType and I'm quite satisfied with its reliability and recommend it to anyone thinking about blogging.