Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : VPS chewing up my RAM?

[moopants]

I have a linux VPS with 768 RAM and unlimited bandwidth. It runs Parallels Power Panel and Plesk 10. There are 2 domains. One with a site attached the other not. The 1 with a site runs a WP blog.

The blog went through a very brief popular phase when an image was viewed a lot but that only brought 2100 visitors a day for 3 days. Maximum is usually around 100 on a busy day.

It is constantly eating up the RAM which means everything stops. Pages dont load, cant access the control panels via web or ssh. Cant ftp either.

I contacted the hosts (Easyspace) who set it up for me and they say I'm on my own - try optimising it but they wont help me any further or suggest what optimisations to make. They also suggested I buy more RAM but I cant afford that.

I had loads of problems when they first set it up with errors etc which they fixed at the time after a bit of serious moaning. As its paid a year in advance, I'm stuck with it and as I cant access it I have no way of fixing it. Ive read a few people have had issues with them on this forum...

Top results:

top - 20:41:20 up 62 days, 4:45, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.00
Tasks: 38 total, 2 running, 36 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 768432k total, 762132k used, 6300k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
23555 www-data 15 0 144m 5020 480 S 0.3 0.7 0:10.17 apache2
1 root 15 0 23436 1592 1264 S 0.0 0.2 0:05.92 init
5518 www-data 15 0 364m 95m 6324 S 0.0 12.8 0:11.80 apache2
7894 root 15 0 21068 1012 772 S 0.0 0.1 0:40.31 cron
7972 root 15 0 49252 2564 2020 S 0.0 0.3 0:37.69 sshd
7990 root 18 0 153m 10m 7128 S 0.0 1.4 0:00.74 sw-engine-cgi
8008 psaadm 19 0 168m 22m 4480 S 0.0 3.0 0:00.26 sw-engine-cgi
8010 psaadm 22 0 153m 4164 704 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.00 sw-engine-cgi
8011 psaadm 23 0 153m 4164 704 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.00 sw-engine-cgi
8035 syslog 15 0 12700 1044 600 S 0.0 0.1 0:40.71 syslogd
8055 root 15 0 13864 720 580 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.12 couriertcpd
8057 root 18 0 3992 604 504 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.03 courierlogger
8080 root 25 0 13864 692 556 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 couriertcpd
8082 root 18 0 3860 408 324 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 courierlogger
8092 root 15 0 13864 756 608 S 0.0 0.1 0:12.99 couriertcpd
8095 root 16 0 3992 604 504 S 0.0 0.1 0:03.05 courierlogger
8112 root 18 0 13864 696 556 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 couriertcpd

User_beancounters also highlighted 3 fails. one with Privmpages - expected if RAM is maxed out but the others were lockedpages and tcprcvbuf and I couldnt find any info on why that may be or what causes them to fail.

I'm relatively new to servers, expected help from a few people who know their server stuff and who bailed on me at the last minute with the project, landing me right in it.

Can anyone advise me without a lecture on noobs? I'm skint and weary and about to walk away from all this.

Thank you in advance.

[devonblzx]

It is probably easier to use

ps aux

to diagnose what is using the most memory. It is hard to tell with the formatting on here but just go through the list and see what the major offenders are under the Mem%. Apache isn't the best at serving static files like images, if you continue to have issues you could try using a reverse proxy with nginx or lighttpd.

[KiloServe]

Originally Posted by moopants

The blog went through a very brief popular phase when an image was viewed a lot but that only brought 2100 visitors a day for 3 days. Maximum is usually around 100 on a busy day.

Wordpress?

Are you running any plugins? If yes, you may want to remove extra feature plugins of your blog.

768MB should run a bare knuckles Wordpress but a heavily loaded blog with a bunch of extra plugins certainly can eat up your RAM.

You may also consider dumping the VPS for a higher quality shared hosting provider. You may get better RAM usage under quality shared hosting plan than a 768MB VPS.

[moopants]

Thanks.

I now cannot access the server at all via ssh. It wont restart etc. 500 errors whenever I try to access anything other than the power panel page.

I cannot give this up for a year as I pointed out in the OP, I paid in advance with a promise of a couple of people that they would take care of the server side of things for me then they bailed.

Ive found a few good optimisation tips but as I cant access anything to do with the back end of sites, I cant change anything.

The site itself seems to be running fine with pages loading in an ok time.

I should add that I was in the process of deactivating the plug ins when all contact ceased with the server backend so could not complete. There werent loads of them just sitemap, askimet, a basic captcha and all in one seo (which ive read can be a mem eater.)

I'm totally confused.

[moopants]

I managed to turn off ALL plugins so its a basic WP blog with less than 100 posts and only 20 visitors in the past day or two.

I still cant ssh to the server or access plesk. Can it still be wordpress?

I'm actually contemplating buying cheap hosting elsewhere for the one site on it but I'm determined to learn this stuff now. No damn computer is getting the better of me.

Where do I begin?