Trouble in dreamhost paradise

Since the migration, the site has been having performance issues. While I had hoped that the site perfromed better with a newer version of Drupal, we're actually seeing worse performance.

Part of this is due to a neater - though slightly less efficient - way of building pages. In an effort to keep down the amount of hard to maintain custom code, I switched from custom mysql calls for the header-panorama and random still/vr blocks (and the new Sponsored by block) to a "views.module" based implementation. A lot cleaner, but a couple more mysql calls. But this by itself can not explain that the site runs fine before 7 am PST, and extremely sluggish after that time (with a comparable amount of traffic before and after that time). After 7 PST, page load times suddenly slack to 10-15 seconds. Not just on the more mysql-heavy pages such as the frontpage, galleries or the tracker ("recent posts"), but all pages.

Unfortunately there seems to be a bigger problem; our mysql server is sluggish. And after 7 PST, it becomes extremely sluggish. Minimal queries take around 20 milliseconds and up each (this is a lot!), and after 7 PST some queries take 1-3 seconds. Not good! Apparently around the same I flicked the switch to put the migrated site back online, Dreamhost started moving servers from one datacenter to another. The infrastructure is still being optimised, so I hope latency between apache and the mysql server will come down again eventually.

Dreamhost support have been friendly and responsive, but ofcourse I would rather see the problem solved.

Update later that same day: In hopes that I'm not jinxing it with this update, Dreamhost seem to be a lot closer to fixing the issues today. At the moment, well after the magical 7 am PST, most simple queries execute in around 1-2 milliseconds again, like you'ld expect them to. So, yay for dreamhost. For now.