[eluser]jplanet[/eluser]
Thanks for checking out CodeIgniter with WebScarab, that confirms what I suspected, which is great news! I had been using Firefox's Live HTTP Headers plugin, but wasn't sure how accurate it was.
My first instinct was to change hosts - I had also threatened to leave, but for $8/month I'm not really putting a dent in anything. I'm sure they just figured that losing a high-maintenance, high-cpu customer would just leave room on that server for someone with a blog that gets five hits each week and never hassles them.
Besides, the good news is that since I've implemented caching -- which was so easy, just a single line of code in each controller function that I wanted to cache -- there have been no CPU issues with Bluehost at all. That was a lot less work than changing hosts, which is a nightmare on a site like this because there are literally transactions every minute, and a site move would lead to an inevitable loss in sales no matter how smoothly it went, if just for the fact that DNS changes propagate in different areas at different times. Then there's the headache with getting a new SSL certificate, which can't be done until the DNS changes take effect, etc...
So, as long as the caching works, which it appears to be doing beautifully, we get to enjoy our dirt-cheap hosting, and customers get a very, very fast website that will keep working even if there's an issue with the database or if other sites on the shared server slow it down...
