Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Low Memory/RAM VPS - Your Ideas on Best Usage - Offload Services from Other Hosts? Monitoring? Other
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Low Memory/RAM VPS - Your Ideas on Best Usage - Offload Services from Other Hosts? Monitoring? Other

I am posting this as a discussion / brainstorming thread for the best uses for low memory VPS accounts many of us may have laying dormant. I want to leave the discussion open as their are many possibilities, and obviously everyone needs is different, but how would you best utilize a VPS currently with a moderately low amount of memory, lets say 256mb - 512mb range with a average amount of storage for a server in this range (i.e. 10gb) 1 cpu shared OVZ just to setup some basic specs.

First to get it out of the way yes I know you can easy optimize a full LAMP stack and derivatives to run fine on a 256mb/512mb server, but lets assume you have a more powerful main server running your stack currently.

Any common services that would make sense to offload from other VPS accounts? Database? NAT? DNS Servers? Your Ideas?

What about possibly remote server monitoring? or a Dedicated log server?

Or other creative or fun idea?

Thanked by 2raindog308 geekalot

Comments

  • DNS/Backup MX are always a good idea, as long as you properly set them up.

    Thanked by 1karjaj
  • weirdaljr said: What about possibly remote server monitoring?

    https://github.com/BotoX/ServerStatus

    It was the easiest for me, and was working on 128MB ram Virmach Special :)

  • "Ghetto CDN" both to cache stuff far away from the central server, and also to proxy the backend server that has the important assets, to make it harder for attackers to find.

    I wouldn't want to do the full LAMP stack thing but remember when 64MB was quite a large computer. There are quite a few services that can be deployed without much ram. Fossil SCM (fossil-scm.org) uses around 2MB and it's a source control system, blog, ticket system, and wiki all rolled into one. I've standardized around Git and don't want to deal with an incompatible system, but its implementation shows how things can be done.

  • For remote monitoring, Nagios works perfectly well with 128MB RAM.

  • Nagios I have used, definitely a good one - Honestly didn't know it had a low memory footprint so that is good to know

    BotoX ServerStatus is a new one for me, but I like it. I think I will do a install somewhere to check it out.

    Fossil SCM sounds Amazing - I think I will find a spot for this somewhere

    How would you propose the Ghetto CDN setup? Standard methods or anything specific to a low memory environment. May not be relevant for static CDN content, just posing the question for thought.

    DNS server makes sense - Not sure of any possible lag added if server is a hair slow. Could that be a concern or non issue?

    Great thoughts guys. Any other creative / productive uses you you guys have seen?

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    weirdaljr said: Any other creative / productive uses you you guys have seen?

    Not particularly creative, but VPN is another common use. My VPNs are all on 128s or 96s. You could run a VPN on a 16MB server probably...with earlier deb versions, probably an 8MB server because I think @KuJoe said he once stripped a Deb 6 system down so it only took 6 or 7MB, and VPN is all in the kernel.

    @willie mentioned git - I haven't done it, but I don't think source code repos need much ram (by this I mean bare git or svn, not running a web interface).

    ntp master though I imagine the scenarios where you want to have your own time authority are unusual.

    gateway box - e.g., your other boxes only accept ssh from a couple small boxes, and those small boxes only allow ssh keys, log everything, send email notification on all logins, etc.

    centralized logging - all syslog dupes to them.

    monitoring besides the usual nagios, zabbix, etc. e.g., a script that walks through several pages of your web site or one that submits a form to validate something works, etc. python or perl + their web libraries doesn't take much RAM to just be a client. Or something that daily monitors your domain expirations. Etc.

    weirdaljr said: Not sure of any possible lag added if server is a hair slow.

    DNS is one of the most over-engineering systems in the world. Everything caches at every level so your server will only be hit if everything upstream doesn't have an unexpired record. Long TTL would help.

  • @raindog308 said:
    DNS is one of the most over-engineering systems in the world. Everything caches at every level so your server will only be hit if everything upstream doesn't have an unexpired record. Long TTL would help.

    Lookit the scrub who doesn't do a 5 minute TTL because CHANGES!

  • LDAP, Kerberos, and RADIUS don't take a lot of resources. LDAP is mainly RAM bound while Kerberos and RADIUS just talk to the directory server, and for a small LDAP deployment, 256-512MB RAM won't be a problem.

    API endpoints. If you have a larger system running a Db, write some small CGI scripts in Perl, Python, C, or whatever to make your own "Serverless" style architecture.

    Monitoring. Write some scripts to check on various services or see what everything looks like externally.

    In memory database cluster. I have no examples and no ideas, but they could be used for a small deployment of that. I'm thinking Redis, but the cluster part isn't free.

    There is quite a bit that can be done with the little boxes, provided the traffic is kept low and the language is appropriate (f'n Java).

    @raindog308 said:
    ntp master though I imagine the scenarios where you want to have your own time authority are unusual.

    I didn't think OVZ and NTPd/Chrony mixed very well since the host is responsible for keeping time.

    I know VMs are known to have problems with keeping time, and the general wisdom is to run NTP masters on baremetal.

    Thanked by 2uptime raindog308
  • Yeah. It's nearly impossible to keep OVZ accurate when the host is lazy.

  • Why not create a git instance to share in lowendtalk ?

  • For me I do use it usually for VPN, Shadowsochs proxy, DNS, Hosting small sites, Asterisk server with a few extensions and testing new stuff
    But a lot of them sit idle most of the time :D

  • @vanhels said:
    Why not create a git instance to share in lowendtalk ?

    it wont work, no one will use your services, since there're more famous git hosting : github, gitlab and selfhosted gitea.


    to add another option to op question, git hosting (gitea or gogs)

    • mail server
    • mailing list (list.org)
    • self hosted s3, minio
    • dnscrypt server
    • reverse proxy for home server behind NAT
    • web proxy "-"
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    If you can run DNS, you can run pi-hole. Works well on a VPS.

    https://pi-hole.net

    Thanked by 1tarasis
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    flatland_spider said: I didn't think OVZ and NTPd/Chrony mixed very well since the host is responsible for keeping time.

    Scenarios in which you'd want your own inaccurate time source outside of your control are even more unusual.

  • @raindog308 said:
    If you can run DNS, you can run pi-hole. Works well on a VPS.

    https://pi-hole.net

    Thanks for that, not come across Pi-Hole before, now have it running on my Raspberry Pi (which is also running retropie). I couldn't imagine running it on a VPS though unless it was particularly close.

  • @raindog308 said:
    Scenarios in which you'd want your own inaccurate time source outside of your control are even more unusual.

    I don't remember the exact details, but there was some issue with NTPd and Chrony the one time I messed around with an OVZ VPS. I want to say it would refuse to start, or something like that. Anyway...

    @tarasis said:
    Thanks for that, not come across Pi-Hole before, now have it running on my Raspberry Pi (which is also running retropie). I couldn't imagine running it on a VPS though unless it was particularly close.

    >

    Running something like Unbound or PowerDNS-recursor to cache DNS locally would mitigate some of the latency once warmed up.

  • vanhels said:

    Why not create a git instance to share in lowendtalk ?

    Was there already something like that? Or was that VPSboard.

    It could be cool to have a gitea or gitlab instance for LET members to share.

    I notice the gitea docs suggest 1GB of ram for a team instance. That's in LET territory but outside "low memory" imo. Just a bare instance has around 150MB virtual memory footprint of which about 45MB is resident. Gitlab is a lot worse and they suggest 4GB (it's written in Ruby).

  • @flatland_spider said:
    Running something like Unbound or PowerDNS-recursor to cache DNS locally would mitigate some of the latency once warmed up.

    dnsmasq should do perfectly fine.

Sign In or Register to comment.