Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : RapidVPS and memory usage/allocation

[Tyrekicker]

I have been with rapidVPS for a few months now. I have so far used it for nothing but testing uptime and reliability before I migrate a fairly sizable (in traffic as opposed to bandwidth) site to their servers.

Apart from the odd hiccup here and there it has not been too bad. Until this week. MySQL was stopping randomly. Again and again. I could restart it via ssh in 5 seconds, and would start without error, but sure enough 5 mins later, dead again.

It turned out INNODB was running out of memory. Strange. My MySQL usage was so small it would barely be more than a few KB, and I apparently have a guaranteed 128MB of ram available to me. A quick 'free -m' showed the nasty details. Free memory, 20-30MB of 4037, Swap usage 100%. Yeah I know, 100% of 1.1 gig of swap.

So I sent them email after email trying to sort it out. Sure enough, finally things were working again. But I wanted to now what was wrong and how they fixed it.

Well no word on what caused the problem, but a quick updated "free -m" shows the stop-gap solution used to cover up whatever problem there is:

Swap:         3609 Available      2486 Used      1123 Free

Well bugger me. Seems like all they did was bump the swap to 3.5Gig, and looky looky, the swap usage is now 2.4Gig!!! The server might be up and running again, but this is certainly not a solution. Oh, but according to them:

This problem was solved by a support engineer early this morning. We have taken steps to ensure this does not occurr in the future. Thank you for your patience while we got this solved.

Call me a pessimist, but this is not what I call "taking steps to ensure this does not occurr in the future".

I think a move to a new VPS might be on the cards.

[CoreBlue-Mike]

Could just be me, but that doesn't seem too promising for the future.

[corevps]

It could be that they didn't set the swap high enough when setting up the box. I believe that SWSoft recommends 2x the RAM. So as such I wouldn't get to worried

[dale]

I've never used RapidVPS, but maybe you could ask them to give a more detailed explanation? Tell them that you're worried. If they value your business they most likely will give you more information.

[minsight]

My RapidVPS was crashing and rebooting every 20 minutes for the entire weekend.

You could find out about it from the complaints on their support forum, except they went in and deleted all the negative posts. Problem solved!!

Also: asking them about problems doesn't seem to help. My control panel hasn't worked for months, and I asked them to fix it and they haven't. When they sprung a spur-of-the-moment "everyone must change every IP address in three days" on us a couple weeks ago, I wanted to back up my VPS using their control panel, but they not only didn't fix it, they didn't even reply to my ticket for days. When they finally did, they said to use "tar" to back up my server.

If you sell a product and promote a feature, then make sure the feature is available. If it's broken, fix it.

I have absolutely zero faith in RapidVPSs ability to administer their servers and would recommend that everybody avoid them (unless you like complications, drama and to be ignored by support). If you're shopping around, go for PowerVPS - I was as stunned by how good their support was as I am stunned by how bad RapidVPSs is.

[Tyrekicker]

Originally posted by corevps
I believe that SWSoft recommends 2x the RAM. So as such I wouldn't get to worried

I have been using linux exclusively for more than three years (FYI slackware), and I have never heard of a 'healthy' system using all its RAM plus 2x the ram's worth of swap. Within 'shared' hosting environments this may be a common thing, I don't know, but I still argue that it is not at all a healty system.

Even if Swsoft suggest 2x the ram as swap as you claim, I doubt they would suggest using the lot. 1 gig free out of ~8gig total memory (~4gig ram + ~4gig swap) is not a good position to be in.

I think the extra few bucks spent on a more expensive VPS provider will be money well spent for me.