Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : VPS & memory - my experience

[jfm30204]

Basically, I screwed up. I came from a shared hosting environment and did not understand the VPS thing well enough. Got in a hurry, bought a 384mb VPS, and transferred a few very low activity sites. I enabled Mailman and Clamd, but made no other changes.

With the server basically idling and doing only a little email, the mem use climbed almost immediately to 390mb or more and processes began crashing. Mailman had gone off the resevation, and that was corrected by the management team - a great bunch, by the way. Usage went down below the 384 limit but then began climbing again to around 400mb. So, we dumped Clamd, and it went down to 291mb but then began climbing again and now sits just under the 384 limit at around 351mb. Who knows where it will top out.

Like I said, this is a different playground, and you need to be ready if you want to play in it. Usually, I do my homework, because, when I don't, I mess up. There is ample testimony on these boards that 512mb is the practical minimum for a cPanel VPS, but I didn't see it. I didn't see it, because I didn't look. Now, my experience seems to support those who say that you should go to 512mb, and I'm not sure that 512 is enough.

Anyway, take a fool's advice and do more research than I did before moving from a shared environment to a VPS.

Incidentally, I didn't mention the name of the VPS host, because I didn't want to imply that any of this was their fault. I like them a lot and wish I could stay with them, but this was probably not the right time.

Jere

[PCS-Chris]

SpamAssassin is the main problem for people with small VPS's and cPanel. With some basic optimization you can easily run cPanel < 256MB infact - even easier with cPanel VPS Optimized.

[CF-Rick]

If you have a managed server your host should be able to do all the optimizations for you (depending on the level of management). I'd send them an email and see if they're able to help you.

[Douglas]

Jere, definitely investigate going onto the VPS Optimized version of cPanel. I've heard of some folks getting RAM usage down to as little as 125 megs of RAM for cPanel.

Be warned that SpamAssassin is a memory hog and one of the first thing advocated for complete removal from running. ClamAV can be a resource hog, if not properly tuned. There are a few tutorials out there on how to properly optimize your VPS running VPS Optimized cPanel, so do some searches via google or cpanel.net

[jfm30204]

Originally Posted by Douglas

Be warned that SpamAssassin is a memory hog and one of the first thing advocated for complete removal from running. ClamAV can be a resource hog, if not properly tuned. There are a few tutorials out there on how to properly optimize your VPS running VPS Optimized cPanel, so do some searches via google or cpanel.net

Spam Assassin doesn't appear to be the problem. Here's top output:

[root@host ~]# top
top - 18:20:35 up 3 days, 19:15, 2 users, load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.00
Mem: 1048576k total, 357516k used, 691060k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
30083 nobody 15 0 94760 35m 13m S 0 3.5 0:18.46 httpd
30079 nobody 15 0 97956 42m 17m S 0 4.1 0:18.19 httpd
30081 nobody 15 0 97.8m 40m 12m S 0 3.9 0:16.52 httpd
3481 nobody 18 0 93892 40m 19m S 0 3.9 0:16.34 httpd
3480 nobody 15 0 95716 42m 19m S 0 4.1 0:16.27 httpd
30072 nobody 15 0 98.7m 41m 13m S 0 4.1 0:16.13 httpd
30074 nobody 15 0 99000 43m 17m S 0 4.2 0:15.55 httpd
30077 mysql 15 0 48240 19m 4024 S 0 1.9 0:15.02 mysqld
30080 nobody 15 0 95840 40m 17m S 0 4.0 0:14.48 httpd
30069 nobody 15 0 93304 33m 13m S 0 3.3 0:14.08 httpd
24475 named 18 0 108m 4088 1944 S 0 0.4 0:08.08 named
13812 root 15 0 40072 36m 2380 S 0 3.5 0:05.88 spamd
3700 root 34 19 10192 6608 1904 S 0 0.6 0:05.01 cpanellogd
22238 root 15 0 2104 1056 824 R 0 0.1 0:04.80 top
3739 mailman 18 0 10708 6688 2556 S 0 0.6 0:04.20 python2.4
3742 mailman 18 0 10708 6696 2556 S 0 0.6 0:04.05 python2.4
13672 nobody 15 0 95804 35m 12m S 0 3.5 0:03.53 httpd
3625 root 18 0 7636 5116 1720 S 0 0.5 0:03.40 tailwatchd
25621 nobody 18 0 43380 11m 1284 S 0 1.1 0:03.19 dccifd

[rghf]

Run top again then press M (capital) to sort by RAM usage and past that

[jfm30204]

It was sorted. For some reason in Putty, it seems to come unsorted in copying to clipboard. I'm attaching a jpg screenshot.

[dale]

How low activity are these low activity sites?

[jfm30204]

Originally Posted by dale

How low activity are these low activity sites?

Except for modest mail use on my account, nearly zero activity.

[sleddog]

~40M seems a very fat Apache. I'd look at recompiling Apache in WHM. Unselect modules you don't really need. You should be able to significantly reduce the size of those Apache processes.

If your low-traffic, you can also reduce the number of Apache processes. How you do it depends on the Apache version (1.x or 2.x) . For a low traffic server you can cut the default numbers at least in half.

[artan]

You can ditch Apache-monster and switch to more lightweight alternatives popular on small VPS
Eg I use nginx and it takes around 5Mb RSS
h**p://hostingfu.com/article/nginx-vs-lighttpd-for-a-small-vps

[Yogesh Sarkar]

What is the timeout for Apache processes?