memory issues

[webhead]

When I first went to a VPS I was immediately getting "out of memory" errors and sites were failing intermittently. I was told to add memory, even though I have only about a dozen sites, all of them small and not very active: some WP blogs, a couple small message boards, but no e-commerce or photo/video sharing. I couldn't believe my sites were pushing the memory envelope but decided to fork over the money, muttering to myself about a vps plan that didn't really come with enough in the first place. And the outages were happening in the wee hours of the morning in my timezone, when none of my sites are active. System services were the only things running then.

But every few months this would happen, and yesterday it happened again. "Get more memory", they tell me, even though I just transferred a site to another host that was running one of the two message boards.

I only went to a vps because it, well, seemed like a kewl idea at the time. I haven't had the time to learn how to really run the thing, and I'm wondering if I should just pass off the sites to their own accounts and go back to shared. I know, major step down, but I never had "out of memory" issues with shared. And sometimes I wonder how the whole Jag site can go down, as it did a few months back, such that I couldn't even put in a trouble ticket.

Thoughts, anyone? Advice? I REALLY don't want to move to other servers again, but I feel like I'm in over my head on the vps and can't keep paying for more memory.

[JPC-Rizwan]

Hi webhead,

Please either let me know your ticket number or get it escalated to level support if its not already.
There are more than one parameters that can result in out of memory errors, if you believe your actual memory usage is not high then we can investigate the QOS parameter limits in detail for your vps or can provide detail about any script/application we see eating lot of memory if that is the case for your vps.

[webhead]

Hi Rizwan, thanks for responding.

Ticket number is 13113949. It started out as a disk space problem, which was slightly helped by the tech removing some old logs.

In the past I've tried to figure out what was causing the problem, but since it almost always happens late at night I can't catch it in the act, and I don't know where I would find a record of it (the logs can be huge and I don't exactly know what to look for).

[jason]

VPS is good if you need (or want) to do anything special with the system that you can't do on shared, such as installing custom services (such as streaming servers, etc.). I use VPS because I'm a Unix admin and I like to tinker. I do custom PHP builds so that I can have the latest (and multiple) versions available. I also have a site on which I'm starting to write apps that programatically manage mail aliases and mailman lists. Under normal cPanel/jailshell conditions, I can't do this on shared servers, but with a few root-level tweaks in Linux and Interworx it becomes a no-brainer.

If you aren't interested in doing any of this, you probably don't need VPS.

--Jason

[webhead]

I agree, Jason... but here I am. The question is, "Should I stay or should I go?" :-)

[JPC-Rizwan]

Hi Rizwan, thanks for responding.

Ticket number is 13113949. It started out as a disk space problem, which was slightly helped by the tech removing some old logs.

In the past I've tried to figure out what was causing the problem, but since it almost always happens late at night I can't catch it in the act, and I don't know where I would find a record of it (the logs can be huge and I don't exactly know what to look for).

Thanks for the update, I will check your ticket and will update it with my findings.