System Resource Suggestions?

G

garaget

New Member
Hey guys and gals,

When I first tested knownhost's vps and the loading speeds were very fast compared to my discount dedicated server (celeron 2.4 512MB Ram). So I moved one of my larger accounts here to a VPS Mca.

Situation
First month was very smooth, but now about 4-5 times a week in the mornings our account keeps running out of system resource. We have to restart it every time then it would be okay for the rest of the day.

Background
We are only hosting one domain with about 60gig of average bandwidth usage with 10 max users on at one time. I have turned off spamd and looked for other processes that might be hogging the memory.

Suggestions?
Would switching from Cpanel to webmin or not using a controlpanel be helpful in not using up system resource? I would upgrade to the L in a heartbeat, but rather be able to control it before I would have to charge my clients more money.

I am very impressed with the support and speeds, but if we have to reset it almost every morning it is not worth the hassle.
 
I know that Plesk is pretty harsh on memory and cPanel uses in the range of 128MB in the first place, so I think you'd be lucky not to burst over RAM on a VPS-M with cPanel. I used webmin on a VPS for a while and it was really nice once I got a cool theme (the default is really crummy). At first it takes a few installations (easy with yum) and then some configuring/tweaking, but it works pretty well once you are done. Some googling helped me along the way. Installing the free virtualmin module lets you control virtual hosts and individual user accounts and their databases, email, and FTP accounts. Webmin isn't really resource intensive at all because it doesn't have a bunch of things going all at once like cPanel and Plesk.

I would recommend first making sure spamassassin is disabled (as long as you don't need it, of course) as it uses up quite a bit of memory. If spamassassin is set to start on boot, use 'chkconfig --del spamassassin' (also may be called spamd) to disable it. Try editing your /etc/my.cnf file to optimize MySQL memory usage as well. Google my.cnf vps optimization or look in the individual VPS forums here to see about possible changes you could make. Also check in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and edit your MaxClients, StartServers, and SpareServers values (lower them) to possibly lower usage more.


If you need any more help feel free to post ;)


-Caleb
 
Webmin (or directadmin in the worst case) should help.
Also, if this is just 1 server and you don't really worry about logs too much, try disabling webalizer.
I really don't want to suggest lighthttp, but you can search about it.
You can stop bind (DNS server) if you can use another DNS server (such as registrar)
You probably mean RAM, when you talk about resources, but if it is CPU, try 1 of Php cache systems (Turck or APC). If your problem is RAM, then I am not sure if a cache would help or make things worse.
You can also set up a cronjob to reboot server every morning at 3-4 am. This is not a good solution, but might help with your problem temporarily till you find a good solution.
Also adding 128 RAM is only $7.5 a month. If your problem is RAM, this will help a lot especially if you use webmin or DA.

Basically, think about what you don't use and shut them all off. Which includes email server, ftp server. You can use SSH (SFTP, too) anyways. I can't make a direct suggestion, because I am not too experienced either. Plus, I don't know what you mean by account. Are there some customers on this VPS? Or is it just 1 big web page, who doesn't require FTP really?

Try some of these commands :

- To see what processes use a lot of RAM :
ps aux | head -1; ps aux | sort -rn +3 | head

- CPU problem? See what uses CPU the most :
ps aux | head -1; ps aux | sort -rn +2 | head -10

- Want to see all processes and the RAM and memory they use in real time?
top -c

You can also see how much apache uses by "top -u apache" . Try that with cpanel (no idea what is user for cpanel). Just do "man top" you can see everything about it.

Good luck.
 
if you use mysql and you don't use onnodb

put

skip_innodb

in your mysql config file which will free up (apparently) 70mb of RAM upon restarting mysql.

there are also other tweaks that will reduce memory (and speed mysql).

A good source of VPS tutorials that deal with this and many other items such as security:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=108

(and I assume Caleb is the Caleb I see posting over at WHT).
 
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