Hi
A month ago I moved my site from a share hosting to a VPS. The reason why I moved the site was because the hosting provider was going to update all servers to PHP 5.3 and since I 'm running Drupal 6 I didn't wanted to take the risk.
I don't know much about VPS and at the beginning everything seemed to work fine, but for the last week I've been experiencing downtimes, Apache's falls and httpd lost conections and also I get OOM issues.
The VPS is a:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz
with 512M
runnning linux
I have an average of 15 to 20 new users every day and I'm a bit scared that this issues can grow up.
I cant believe that having one VPS dedicated to just one site can't give more of itself.
Any tips or recommendations please?
Thanks
P.D The site is http://onsoundwave.com
Comments
Memory probably a bit low
Are you running cPanel on there? You might just get away with 512M for a cPanel server, but the lowest guaranteed (not burstable) RAM I'd recommend for cPanel in production is 768M.
Is your host offering a managed service with the VPS? If so, I'd ask them to help - you can give them root access, and they can tweak it. As you say, you have just one site on there. That should make it possible to tweak for your site.
Alternatively, could you paste the output from the following two commands?
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cPanel
Edit: Yes - this is a cPanel hosting environment. (Just open http://213.175.223.182:2083)
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First of all thanks for the
First of all thanks for the help JamesOakley.
Yes I'm using cpanel and yes I have a managed service. But although sutomer support is great, because every time I had an issue it was solved in matter of minutes, they do not know anything about Drupal.
I asked them if the VPS were configured in a standar way or if they were configures to it's maximum and they reply they were done in a standard way.
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 512 228 283 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 228 283
Swap: 0 0 0
That's quite a lot of free RAM
I assume it's not under load. Next time things start falling down, run that again (and the ps command) and paste it then.
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That's quite a lot of free RAM
I assume it's not under load. Next time things start falling down, run that again (and the ps command) and paste it then.
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512 is not a lot
You're going to have trouble with a Drupal site of any complexity with that amount of memory, I'm afraid. You could think about making sure you are not running any services on the server that you don't need, making sure you don't have any Drupal modules enabled that you don't need, etc. You can also look at tuning down your Apache configuration to only run a small number of apache processes (I can't really be very definitive about this without knowing how your server is configured). Probably if you don't know about managing servers you're better off with a shared account than trying to manage a VPS.
Steve Hanson
Publisher Eye On Dunn County
https://eyeondunn.com
I agree with Steve.Although
I agree with Steve. I also agree with James. The cPanel automated update can crash a VPS with 512MB RAM (it happened to me).
Although I am a declared sceptic about about running Drupal on shared hosting, the idea that switching to a VPS with .5GB RAM will make things better is not really true (quite apart from some issues with quality if you were to choose a cheaper VPS provider, such as the issue of overselling on OpenVZ VPSs). The root access does make life easier, but those resources are not great. Hosting Drupal well is not cheap.... if possible, spend more, and if not, maybe consider one of the high-grade shared hosting options.
I get ooms with Drupal on a Linode VPS with 1.5GB RAM, largely down to the amount of memory I allocate to mysql caching. But things were far worse when I cut RAM to 1GB, and there was a lot more swapping, which increased disk io. In the end I am thinking 1.5GB is not really enough.
Last year I used dedicated server with 2GB RAM and that worked pretty well for the Drupal sites I run. If your large number of new users are logged-in users, and you want them to have a good experience of the site (as obviously you do), I would be thinking about that kind of level of resources myself.
Also, especially if your VPS is on OpenVz, suspect overselling. Not all 512MB VPSs are equal (even from the same provider, let alone differences between cheap and high quality providers).
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
Thanks for the answer
Thanks for the answer Steve,
I totally agree with you regarding the complexity of having to manage a VPS, but thing is that price is not bad and as I said earlier it is a managed service. Maybe the problem is that they don't tune the VPS for Drupal.
price is not bad At the end
At the end of the day, you usually get what you pay for.
For an unmanaged VPS, Linode is among the most expensive. Others charge half or a third the price for the same paper specs. Many Drupal enthusiasts choose Linode. This is not because we are too lazy or stupid to work out that there are very attractively priced alternatives, with same or better specs on paper. You can be lucky with a cheap VPS, but generally if the price is low, the performance will be low. I write from experience. Often for a low budget option shared hosting does make sense. I would think omega8 or Lithic Media, suggested below, would be excellent choices, though I have not used them.
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
If not linode which are other good servers
If it is not linode which other server would you recommend to host a site made in DRUPAL 6.20. The site attracts a lot of traffic.
This is pertaining to the site www.dentistrytoday.info which is on linode and at this point of time is experiencing OOming issues.
Customer support is good but it is unmanaged hosting provider and not all programmers are good at managing servers.
My programmers prefer a server which has a C panel etc.
Any suggestions for the future ? Hope to see a lot of them and thanks in advance for all the valueable inputs.
Regards,
Dr. Veerendra Darakh
You get what you pay for.
You get what you pay for. Managed server with high quality engineers is expensive. You can install cPanel on Linode. But what quality do you want and what do you want to spend? I would suggest Xen virtualization as a minimum. But why are you asking here? It is up to your programmers to advise, that is what you pay them for? If they are Drupal specialists they will know the hosting options. If they are not Drupal specialists, best fire them as they will unintentionally cause problems on a Drupal site even if they are otherwise good programmers! I have seen this happen, as have others.
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
Looks like you have no swap configured
The Free output would indicate that your site has absolutely no swap space configured for the VPS - so if you start to have any memory shortage (and with this amount of memory you will) all the system can do is kill processes.
Steve Hanson
Publisher Eye On Dunn County
https://eyeondunn.com
DRUPAL sites on shared hosting
If not a VPS where can a DRUPAL site ( made in 6.20 and which attracts a lot of traffic and spam be hosted . The site is www.dentistrytoday.info and is experiencing OOm right now).
Which shared hosting is best for Drupal sites
Please help.
Regards,
Veerendra Darakh
Aegir VPS
I would strongly suggest an Aegir VPS host, look at omega8.cc or lithic media. Prices are reasonable, multitudes of Drupal distros as well dev,stage,prod instances on Vanilla Drupal installs. One click backup, clone, migrate.
This thread may be over 2 yrs
This thread may be over 2 yrs old, but the issue is still valid as 512mb vps is largely sold.
For a 512mb VPS you can consider nginx or openlitespeed instead of apache for webserver.
Honestly I just don't think
Honestly I just don't think 512MB is enough for a VPS... you might as well stick with a decent shared host that doesn't oversell.
gonggo is quite right that Nginx would help, particularly with PHP-FPM as it greatly reduces the memory size of PHP processes.
Can be fun
Some people like the challenge of fitting as much as they can onto as small a (virtual box) as they can.
I've run a Drupal site on a 256 MB VPS. It was tight, granted. I did use Apache, but tuned it to have minimal idle processes. The VPS was only running one site, so I could tune MySQL to suit that site's database exactly with little left over. I used VirtualMin rather than cPanel, and disabled all the modules / pre-loaded webmin daemons that I didn't need (things like SpamAssassin).
You'd be amazed what you can fit onto a low end box. 512M is massive compared to that.
However, unless squeezing a site onto a small VPS is your thing, people probably want to work on their Drupal site and not on the environment. At that point, I'd agree with Paul: Non-oversold (or, at least, non-overloaded) shared hosting is probably going to give a better Drupal environment than a small VPS.
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Amen,
Amen,
Yeah it's loads of fun as a technical exercise. The adventure in frugality that you describe is a perfect example of why I've never really been excited about VPS or Cloud for that matter. It's fun to squeeze every last drop out of a small box but even more fun to do the same thing on a really big box! ;-)
Obviously there are businesses cases for using a VPS or Cloud solution and not everyone can justify the cost of a dedicated server. Trouble is, you really need the same technical expertise and time to optimise a VPS as you would a dedicated box and you get way less horsepower to work with.
The people using VPS and Cloud really successfully to role our Drupal sites are those with automated provisioning, puppet, etc.
It's a whole lot of fun for hosting junkies like us. For a developer that wants to focus on site functionality and delivering business value to their clients... VPS is probably just misdirected time.
VPS seems to be the de facto standard for those who's current shared hosting has stopped meeting their needs. But there's probably better options:
- Host with James, I or other quality Drupal specific shared hosts
- Checkout SaaS products like GetPantheon
Those sort of managed solutions will likely save you configuration time, money and let's not forget the security headaches.