(2013-10-26, 04:03 AM)Dylan M. Wrote: [ -> ]I wouldn't say Debian uses less RAM than CentOS. It all depends on what services you have running. My minimalist CentOS 6.3 install was using only 53MB of RAM w/out httpd running. Sadly something did change in 6.4 that increased it to 59MB, but I'm not sure what as yet. I don't care enough to find out since I have 2GB of RAM on it.
In my experiences a Debian minimal install uses less RAM than CentOS does. CentOS generally has more stuff enabled by default, I wouldn't really say services but yeah. Both are great distros.
For typical PHP/MySQL websites, usually MySQL and whatever runs PHP will consume the most memory. Memory usage can usually be tweaked by studying the configuration of those.
Adjusting MySQL buffer sizes etc can have a drastic impact on its memory usage (also disable InnoDB if you aren't using it).
+1 to MySQL being the likely cause. If you've installed MySQL from a repo and done nothing to try and optimise it, it will consume a fair bit of memory. You can easily run a small LAMP stack on less than 256mb of memory and still have plenty of breathing room.
(2013-10-26, 02:01 PM)jarrox Wrote: [ -> ]Use a cloud service like cloudflare. It will protect you from ddos aswell. FYI - VPS sucks!
You have no idea what you're talking about it seems.
What the heck are the benefits of a Cloud
Server over a traditional VPS?
Despite the similarities to a traditional VPS, a cloud
server has several significant advantages that can be
beneficial to a website owner. Cloud Servers have
three primary advantages over a traditional VPS.
Near limitless flexibility with resource sizes.
On the fly resource upgrades, sometimes without
even requiring a reboot.
Significantly better redundancy
Centralized redundant storage
The first two advantages go together; with a cloud
server, you’re able to upgrade to significantly higher
server specifications, and you’re able to do it on the
fly. This means that if your site starts to receive an
enormous amount of traffic, it’s not necessary to
migrate your site to a new server. You can simply add
more resources, and the changes will take effect
immediately, on the existing server.
The second two also go together quite well. In the
traditional VPS environment, your server is hosted on
a single hypervisor, with typically the hard drives
running in a RAID 10 array. Not a bad setup. With a
cloud server, your server can be hosted on any of
the hypervisors on the cloud, because your data is
hosted on a centralized storage system called a SAN.
With this arrangement, if a hypervisor fails in the
cloud, another one can simply take over the work of
hosting your cloud server. Most cloud providers also
take it one step further, by replicating your data
across multiple SAN units. This means that one of the
SAN fails, the other will take over the process of
hosting your data.
All and all, cloud servers have essentially taken the
traditional VPS and made significant improvements to
it. Considering that a cloud server normally runs
around the same price range as traditional VPS
hosting, there’s really no reason not to consider the
cloud for your website.
Cloudflare isn't a cloud hosting service though. Cloud hosting is great and makes it easy to scale but there are downsides. The most common one was the long read write times which has basically been fixed not through improving the tech but by making everything SSD. Either way it doesn't make you immune to a DDoS and cloud is normally more expensive.
Interesting replies to the topic thus far
Thanks guys!
Edit: Fixed my problem
The key thing I had to learn about VPSs is that for CentOS the installer does the absolute bare minimum to get things working. If you want to get it working well you gotta get in there and modify the config files to set up all the little settings. Google is your friend for this! I tend to look at several different guides to see how things work overall, then tailor it to my specific needs.
iPodWizard.net runs off 2 VPSs: a 512MB one that handles Apache/PHP and a 1538MB one that handles MySQL. Honestly we did it this way 'cause my partner that bought the hosting derped and got the 512MB one first, and Virpus didn't want to let us merely upgrade it, but right now with a decently consistent 30+ users online we're doing fine. Most of our early troubles were due to MySQL trying to eat all the RAM and paging, though who can blame it with a gigabyte database on a 512MB server. Add to that the fact that I hadn't configured it 'cause I thought the installer would at least kind of tailor it to the system and things just didn't work.