How much RAM should I need on my VPS package? Am I being ripped off?

Question

So, I'm currently on a VPSVille Cpanel3 account that has 768 MB guaranteed ram and 2048 MB burst ram (full details here: http://www.vpsville.ca/cpanel-vps). It's running CentOS, Cpanel, Apache and FastCGI.

On the server itself I have a Joomla community site with a forum system that generally has about 20 people on it max at any point and even then, during the evening, no one. It's a pretty small site but has a number of modules running on it. It gets about 6000 visits a month. Also on the server is a WordPress site that gets about 80-150 visits a day, 2 other WordPress sites that aren't developed yet so they don't get any traffic at all, and 2 static HTML websites that also only get about 500 hits a month. All in all, no huge sites.

The issue is that I get "out of memory" errors fairly frequently and it kills my server and I need to reboot it in order to get all my sites up and running again. It seems to me that I shouldn't have these issues with that much RAM allotted to my account. Every time I send in a support ticket, they just tell me to upgrade the RAM.

Now, I'm still pretty new to all this, so I'm not a good judge of how much I really need for my sites to run. I don't know if my sites really do need this much or if VPSVille has oversold their servers, they don't actually have those resources available and I'm getting ripped off.

So, how much RAM should I be using with my current setup?

Solution 1

You should set up monitoring on your own to monitor the RAM usage on the VPS. You could do this with something like nagios, or sar / sysstat. If the VPS provider provides those stats, you might want to check those as well.

Keep in mind that burstable might mean it can only burst for a few minutes, then if you don't go back down to 768, you might not have enough memory.

As for a solution to high memory usage, you might want to look into basic tuning of Apache, such as Max threads / processes etc, or different MPM options (threaded or perfork). You also might want to look at lighter weight http servers such as nigix.

Solution 2

Get rid of cPanel, it's just a big waste of RAM for personal use. Try learning how to edit the config files yourself instead of reling on cPanel to do it for you. You will save ram this way because there is nothing running just to configure your services.

Another thing you could try switching to a Xen based VPS. Xen has better memory management

Solution 3

With that kind of traffic, your server should more than suffice with 768 MB of RAM. Even 256MB will be enough. What you will need to do is to tune your running services. You can probably tune Apache or get rid of it entirely and replace it with one of the lighter web servers like lighttpd or nginx servers. Limit the number of FastCGI threads spawned and also limit your PHP memory usage.

Solution 4

I think that you have the OOM Killer doing its job. Check /var/log/messages:

zgrep -i oom /var/log/messages*

Check how much memory is allocated by the VMware balloon driver. Check if you have the latest version of the VMware Tools. What is the output of cat /proc/meminfo?

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Comments

[Dave Drager]

Concur, also check out apache processes using ExtendedStatus to see how many processes you are wasting (or if you are maxing them out). Burstable is just a marketing ploy, only go by your guaranteed memory.

[Kyle Brandt]

Burstable can be handy, if you have low memory requirements, it can help when compiling the software to start with or hungry package managers like yum. But you are right that for production use, you should just be looking at the amount of guaranteed memory.

[Marco Demaio]

Editing the config files also to set up all emails on the server?