Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : VPS hangs due to more memory consumption

[neobee]

Hi All,

We have our VPS with 768MB Memory. Site traffic is the medium only. Lately our server is getting hanged due to more memory consuming processes.

1) Spam Assassin
2) Clamd

Plan is to upgrade the memory alone for now.

Is there any other suggestions to optimize the resource usage?

Thanks in Advance.

[RavC]

How much memory are you actually using, have you run "free -m" to check? Otherwise I guess you can try disable all unnecessary services, look at optimizing MySQL memory usage, adjust Apache parameters to reduce memory usage etc.

[neobee]

-bash-3.00# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1843 314 1528 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 314 1528
Swap: 0 0 0


Can you suggest the list of unnecessary services. VPS is cPanel.

[SeedBit]

You have loads of free RAM. It mustn't be that causing the problem.

[UNIXy]

Originally Posted by SeedBit

You have loads of free RAM.

That's inaccurate.

The free command on VZ reports the burst amount of RAM. For example, when you sign up for a VZ VPS with 768MB dedicated and 1843MB burst, free -m reports 1843MB total RAM. Burst is on best effort. Heck even dedicated RAM is on best effort! In this case, the VPS is not even guaranteed to have access to 768MB!

Meet the side effects of overselling.

Regards

[iTom]

Originally Posted by UNIXy

Meet the side effects of overselling.

Sounds right, have you asked your VPS host?

[sej7278]

kill off clamd, i had to when i was running spamassassin and clamav on the same 512/1024mb vps as my webservers etc.

i'm going to move email to its own server soon and think about re-enabling clamav.

the vps shouldn't hang though. spamassassin uses the most cpu on my vps of all the processes but never more than 25% or something.

[SeedBit]

Originally Posted by UNIXy

That's inaccurate.

The free command on VZ reports the burst amount of RAM. For example, when you sign up for a VZ VPS with 768MB dedicated and 1843MB burst, free -m reports 1843MB total RAM. Burst is on best effort. Heck even dedicated RAM is on best effort! In this case, the VPS is not even guaranteed to have access to 768MB!

Meet the side effects of overselling.

Regards

Yes. The OP claims he has 768MB and free -m shows 1843, so I guess he has 768 "guaranteed" 1843 burst. He is only using 314 which is well within 768MB.

[zendzipr]

Originally Posted by neobee

Hi All,

We have our VPS with 768MB Memory. Site traffic is the medium only. Lately our server is getting hanged due to more memory consuming processes.

1) Spam Assassin
2) Clamd

Clamd loves to eat RAM. Turn it off and you should be fine. Additionally, take some time and tune your apache settings to reduce number of servers.

[UNIXy]

Originally Posted by SeedBit

Yes. The OP claims he has 768MB and free -m shows 1843, so I guess he has 768 "guaranteed" 1843 burst. He is only using 314 which is well within 768MB.

I know it did sound odd but 768MB of guaranteed RAM is not really guaranteed with VZ. So being guaranteed 768MB doesn't mean you can use up to 768MB without a hiccup. On the contrary, you might not even be able to use 64MB out of your "dedicated" 768MB. It depends on how much free physical RAM is available on the server.

Almost no one in the business would talk openly about it unless one points it out. We've had to limit the number of VPS node to 8 per server and underallocate to avoid this issue altogether. Or use Xen. Checkout this wiki article for a guide on how to spot things like this:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/wiki/K...,_or_bandwidth

Regards

[neobee]

I have disabled clamd for now. let me observe for some more days.