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Who wants RAM?
GoodHosting
Member
Seriously, who here only cares about the RAM their VPS has, and actually knows what they can use it for? This is a serious question that goes out to customers, as frankly; as a provider, I would much rather give some RAM to someone I know who is going to shit up my I/O on the entire SAN for the rest of my customers when they try and run their software in a 512MB VPS with an 8GB pagefile ...
I would easily say that I/O is the most expensive resource in any of my deployments, where [ as the nature of centralized storage is ] , I can always deploy more hypervisors to even out the load, and even live migrate containers whenever I feel like it; without clients being affected at all. Therein, RAM and CPU are no longer finite limits, whereas I/O limitations will always take the cake.
Realistic suggestions please, and at or under the yearly or monthly limits as set by the forum we're all posting on. [ This is in direct response to the thread below this, regarding "high RAM VPS" under requests. ]
Or will people insist on creating massive pagefiles and installing Windows on VPSes that are clearly too small for Windows to happily live on? Is this simply a market norm here to stay until someone proves there to be a better way?
Comments
I care about RAM... if it's above 512MB it's either going to be above what I would be willing to pay or unsustainable.
Seriously though, no, not all of us go for RAM porn. I am happy to use 64/128/256MB boxes and would even consider 32s.
Some providers, in any case tilaa.com, will suspend you if you swap to much for this reason.
The reasoning is that everybody suffers from this and therefore there is (was?) a limit on swap usage.
I'm very happy when customers like you come around, as very few would be able to install any Operating System on anything less than 128MB of RAM [ due to most installers taking more than that. A good example would be CentOS' Anaconda that takes at least 384MB of RAM, even though the resulting OS does not. ]
I'll usually settle with 512mb ram as an above average standard, and 1gb for nearly perfect for everything that I'm doing now. The only moment that I need high ram is actually a public modified Gateone instance where each instance will use up ~10mb of RAM which is hefty in size
Yes, but in the world of real virtualization [ KVM for example ] , there's no means for me [ a provider ] to stop you from going into your box, and creating or extending the Page File; as your OS is real and can do whatever it wants with its storage space.
If it were OpenVZ, sure; that's much easier to moderate, since that's not actually virtualized or a real Operating System running. You share your kernel with the host machine, among other things.
The only reason I get the big RAM VPS's is because I only buy a few boxes (right now I have two, one OpenVZ and another one KVM), and want to make sure my projects and other stuff are holding up. They're not even using 40% of the allotted RAM at the moment though, and I really don't go overboard with the I/O usage, generally idling.
EDIT: I also have a 512MB "cloud server", but it's just idling, lol.
@GoodHosting (how good is your hosting? ;-) maybe there should be a FUP, like commonly used with mobile data (at least where I live) and a notice/penalty for people that go way beyond the average I/O. I have never seen a provider having something like this, but maybe it is a good system for this case.
I personally have one 2GB VPS from a special that I use for remote desktop, otherwise I don't think I have anything above 512MB; most of my VPS are 128MB's and below. I mostly run a single application per server as I like to keep things separate and not rely on a single container/host, the only exceptions are my dedi's which I abuse like a red-headed step child.
CentOS 6 is a pain in the *** when it comes to the installation. The installer is the worst I've seen in this case. 384 MB RAM for limited text mode installation and at least 512 or 768 MB RAM (can't recall how much exactly) for a GUI installation.
Totally agree with you on this.
You know the solution, right? It's so easy...
Debian
Mining on it like there's no tomorrow!
Why not get SSD?
512mb ram is fine for everything I do, normally about 200mb left over for anything else that might be needed
SWAP is disabled on my KVM.
Pagefiles destroy the still-limited IOPS capacity you have with SSDs, especially if you're using "datacenter" SSDs, which generally have less than 20,000 Write IOPS for 4k random. It can really add up when you've got 10 nodes off one SAN with 48 drives, as all the damned pagefiles end up together [ f**king hate Windows... ]
1GB is the sweet spot for me personally. I do fine with 512MB (usually running at around 200MB) but I like having some extra RAM available just in case.
Exactly the same here!
I guess, it can be a solution, to offer more RAM at all plans, so users will stuck not on RAM, but on CPU or Disk Space then
I'm not against killing the market.
And by killing the market, I mean returning the market back to what it used to be; the serious hosts doing serious business. None of what it is now with sommers and such.
end sarcasm
@GoodHosting I use a couple of 1GB or more ram boxes that they host busy joomla sites (first 2GB Ram with 4,5K visitors per day, a little heavy in load and the second, 12GB Ram with 2.5K visitors per day - in both cases average visitors). Most of my rest boxes has 512MB, 256 and some of them, 128MB. I run some shoutcast and icecast boxes in 128 and 96MB vps's, and some nginx rtmp streaming setups (only streaming, not re-encoding) in 128MB vps's.
So, it depends on the project. To sum up, when I tried to run the heavy joomla site in a 512MB box, it were sometimes on the limit.
Is this thread about BlueVM KVM offer with 512MB and some people want to run Windows on it?
If yes, previously I run my Windows 2003 server under 256MB ram from Sonicvps and BuyVM. But they still working just fine, but as the default, I forgot to set the swap.
My 50MB vps, still served it's jobs, by using Debian, I can run small blog with Nginx+MySQL+Php, plus znc, openvpn, ppp, and munin.
Another 385MB vps been up for almost a year too. So, for me, RAM is just when I need it, all depends to what I need and what the application needed
I usually need at least 1GB RAM. A Java app I host eats around 400-600mb, and MySQL at least 250mb
One can use a high-ram vps as a memcached or other type of proxy, with smaller vps' at the backend, load balanced. Most of my vps machines are 512mb, and I know their limits, most are smallish websites, dns or webservers. (My previous employer was a mutli billion dollar company, and our dns cluster had machines with 32gb of memory, while bind was only ever using 900mb. This was serving about 1600 zones). Small boxes make great dns servers.
You're absolutely right when you say iops are what costs money, and bandwidth, as well. If someone didn't care about iops/bandwidth, it's super simple to give them a killer deal.
As for storage, distributed storage is the way to go, you need to grow your storage cluster out as well as the main hypervisor resources like ram and cpu.
I use minimal installs when possible and remove everything like apache, bind, vi, etc.. but I've had issues installing things with 128MB before. APT runs out of memory, and Dropbox always runs out of memory on my 128MB box too unless I stop MySQL
Iniz 256MB OpenVZ VPS. 7x Alpine in screen for emails, Postfix, Nginx + PHP-FPM for the web, Finch for IM. All this in Ubuntu 14.04 x86.
KiB Mem: 262144 total, 66836 used, 195308 free
Plenty of ram left
What is there really that could take up 1GB+ RAM apart from java apps and servers? I never really found the solution to that problem, hence my VPSDime 6GB is always idle.
Ruby on Rails apps and servers (such as GitLab).
Ditto. Mine's a dev box/testing environment... sometimes.
The problem with any plans that have 1 maxed out feature is that they're not balanced enough. They might have say.. a ton of bandwidth... but horrible disk I/O. They might have a ton of ram, but to utilize it all you'd need to hit the CPU harder than the limit they provide.
To me it's more about balance. I think there are definitely niche use cases where a ton of feature X would be useful, but I'd much rather have a nice balance.
Windows Server 2008 R2 will happily gobble up 2GB of RAM if you completely disable paging / swapping [ Virtual Memory Size set to 0 [ kernel option ] + page file set to disabled on all partitions. ]
This is the REAL / ACTUAL memory footprint of the bloated operating system. In my testing, with Search disabled, all .NET uninstalled, no roles or features installed, XPS and various other things removed; I was only able to shave this down to 1290MB or so.
If you've weighed out the cost between reduced I/O or more ram, I'd say allocate more ram to these clients & send one of those "we value you as a customer, we've given you a bonus 1GB (for example) amount of ram." emails.
You = happy.
Client = happy.
On the plus side, some clients will even refer friends or write a review.
The awkward moment when the clients keep their large page files and increase usage even further.