by Ken Task.
@Doug ... Thanks for that ... guess it was a way to say ... stay out and let Jonthan answer ... a polite way.
Did some more digging ... much to be discussed with hosting provider ... can't offer a solution.
On this page:
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/hosting-guide/hosting-plan-comparison/hosting-comparison-chart
There is an interesting section of information entitled: Server Resources
Under a column they call 'Feature'
Server Resources Limit and for 'shared' I see a % - 25%
(does this mean there are only 4 customers on a shared system?)
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/cpu-resource-usage
It is unlikely that you hit the 25% CPU usage for 90 seconds at a time, unless your site is script intensive and requires more processing.
One thing they don't say there ... a process that hits those limits is killed and reports NO errors - it's like a kill -9 on a process via command line.
Simultaneous Processes and for 'shared' it's 25.
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/processes-limit
Now that talks about just the Web server. What of the DB server where the DB resides? There are lots of queries of the DB in a backup process.
On backups of a large course in a dedicated server running it all ... web and DB ...
it's not unusual to see 'top' show the php process hit 100% of the CPU on
a 16Gig Mem - 4 core server. It doesn't stay 100% very long ... a second or two ... then
drops down somewhere in the 80-90% range and then vastllates 70->80_>90-> etc. ... but it's consistently high compared to other processes - top command polls every 2 seconds I think.
In an automated run of all courses, one can tell when one course backup has been completed
cause just before the next course in the list begins it's process, CPU usage/MySQL usage
drops to 'normal levels' (whatever that means) ... but doesn't stay there long.
A backup in Moodle of a single course done from the course menu is one thing.
That's using the scripts on the web server that talk to that backhanded DB server and your DB.
Automated backups for the site ... all courses ... is another. It's really the same process as backing up a single course from the course menu, it's just one right after another as quickly as Moodle can run it. Dunno how often a HostGator setup would start a timer on a process and stop watching but could imagine the 'watcher' is still watching/calculating/timing and very well could reach that 90 second limit on a process that did hit 25% for an instance ... enough to trigger.
If you stay with your hosting plan, the only thing that I could offer/suggest that might help is to look at those assignments and see if you couldn't find a way to make them 'smaller' ... or not as many.
'spirit of sharing', Ken