VPS privvmpages

[ccobalt]

Background:
I have a development/pro bono site VPS on the Discovery plan with 320MB and WHM/cPanel (Optimized version). Only one site is really live and it's running a Wordpress 2.5 installation. It is a very, very low traffic site and has been up since April.

In the past month, I've been called twice to say that the site is showing a message about memory errors. Both times, privvmpages has shown up in the VZPP area as in the black and yellow zone for a long period of time (hours or days). I've restarted the server to fix it both times.

This second time, I contacted support because I saw some probing activity in the error_log having to with multiple variations of phpmyadmin scripts. I hardened the server per the instructions here but these guys are more experienced than I am so I'm having them do their thing.

I've learned so much on these forums I thought I'd put it out there for ideas or suggestions. I'm not aware of any existing log for memory trends on the VPS but that doesn't mean that there isn't one

Failing that, can anybody recommend memory/process/etc monitoring software that they really like and couldn't live without? My first impulse is to whip up a quick script that writes to a log and emails me every day which I may do today just for my own piece of mind.

Thanks for reading,
Chris

[thisisit3]

First of all, 320mb is rather low, i would suggest at least 512mb for a VPS with cPanel/WHM (which is rather memory hungry when running things like mailman).

You should log in as root in your WHM and disable Interchange, mailman and other silly applications like that. You should also stop WHM services like cpdavd which eat a lot of memory.

If you want a monitoring script, you can find one in my signature (JagMonitor) and also a shell script for displaying the memory usage of your VPS when you are in the shell.

[ccobalt]

First of all, 320mb is rather low, i would suggest at least 512mb for a VPS with cPanel/WHM (which is rather memory hungry when running things like mailman).

You should log in as root in your WHM and disable Interchange, mailman and other silly applications like that. You should also stop WHM services like cpdavd which eat a lot of memory.

If you want a monitoring script, you can find one in my signature (JagMonitor) and also a shell script for displaying the memory usage of your VPS when you are in the shell.

You know, I almost thanked you in another thread for those very scripts especially the memory one but the post was rather old. So here's my thank you. I've already found both the vmem script and the JagMonitor really useful.

I'll look into disabling some applications that I know I won't need thanks for the initial list of things to start with. I think that should help.

You know cPanel/WHM Optimized has been running at about 50% mem usage since I installed it back when it was an EDGE release so it's not near as memory hungry as it used to be but if disabling some of the apps that I don't need doesn't help, I think it's time to upgrade.

Thanks for the ideas.

[thisisit3]

No problem, i'm glad my scripts are of use to you.

Another thing to try is to run a "ps ax" and look at the running processes, find the ones which are either of no use or you don't know what they are and start googling them.

For example, i found that cpdavd is kept running even when its disabled from WHM (and i've disabled it for security reasons), so i had to terminate it manually. Once /scripts/upcp runs and updates your system every day, it will re-load again so i've made a cron script to kill any unnecessary processes that cPanel/WHM loads. So far one of the biggest memory hogs has been mailman.

Good luck.

[RaZor Edge]

No problem, i'm glad my scripts are of use to you.

Another thing to try is to run a "ps ax" and look at the running processes, find the ones which are either of no use or you don't know what they are and start googling them.

For example, i found that cpdavd is kept running even when its disabled from WHM (and i've disabled it for security reasons), so i had to terminate it manually. Once /scripts/upcp runs and updates your system every day, it will re-load again so i've made a cron script to kill any unnecessary processes that cPanel/WHM loads. So far one of the biggest memory hogs has been mailman.

Good luck.

Hi,

Would it be possible for you to share this cron script? Might be useful!

I have disable cpdavd some times ago but as you said, it always come back after update or restart.

Thanks