VPS Frustrations

wd5gnr said 2 years, 5 months ago:

I just moved a dedicated server I’ve had for ages to a VPS here.

It seems pretty good but I’m frustrated with a few things.

1) The Simple Control Panel (aka Turbopanel) is hogging up about 256MB of RAM and appears to leak. I have taken to shutting it off unless I want to use it (I typically don’t use a panel anyway but I have a “user” and I like to leave them with some kind of panel option). I have thought about disabling SCP 100% and installing Webmin which works well.

2) I’m not sure if it is the CP or not, but the server occasionally runs out of either memory or some kernel resource. Then its dead. If I have a shell open I can do anything that doesn’t fork. If I have a root shell open I can use echo /proc/* to see the PIDs and try killing them. Sometimes I can kill something that lets me get enough resources to reboot and sometimes I kill sshd at which point I’m toast. The reboot on the CP and the “power cycle” button outside the CP do not work when this occurs.

3) Apparently there is something with the VPS solution used that doesn’t like FUSE. I use fuse-zip to build a zip file from a PHP script dynamically. No matter what I do, /dev/fuse says no permission. Yes I’m in the fuse group (don’t worry about Apache, I can’t even get it to work). Surfing the web this seems to be a not uncommon problem with VPSs although with a newish kernel and fuse it is supposed to work. I rebuilt fuse from source, but no dice.

Any suggestions? Is anyone using Fuse? Is anyone using the Simple CP without killing themselves? Has anyone replaced it with Webmin? I wonder if all the weird stuff SCP does with named and the apache config will bite me?

bruce said 2 years, 5 months ago:

This a Test

Baillee said 2 years, 5 months ago:

@wd5gnr

The issues that you’re having with the memory usage of your control panel, and the server itself running out of memory, should not be occurring. I highly recommend either submitting a ticket, or opening a chat with our Server Support so that they may take a look at it.

Also, I’m not familiar with Fuse and couldn’t find much information to point you in the right direction. Let’s see if some other users here have had any luck with it!

- Baillee

wd5gnr said 2 years, 5 months ago:

Thanks for the reply. Well, killing turbo panel has definitely made the server stable. I put Webmin on and its fine. I’ve been up 3 hours and I still have 638M free out of 1024. Webmin is pretty capable anyway. I have filed 3 tickets on this and had one live chat, but I think I’m ok on it now as long as I keep turbopanel disabled.

Fuse is a pretty common thing for mounting file systems in user space. A lot of people use it to mount via ssh, but in this case I have a script using it to make a zip file as a file system. I just rewrote it to use zip and so I’m good there.

So today I’m happier. A few days without crashing and I’ll be even happier.

Baillee said 2 years, 5 months ago:

@wd5gnr

I’m happy to see that things seem to be more stable for you. Please keep us in the loop on this, and let us know if there is anything we can do to help!

- Baillee

wd5gnr said 2 years, 5 months ago:

Crossing my fingers.

One other thing I noticed is that /var/log/messages is consistently empty. Is the system log file elsewhere? I know where Apache is dumping its logs but where are the system messages?

wd5gnr said 2 years, 5 months ago:

Answered my own question. rsyslogd was not set up to run on boot.

Baillee said 2 years, 5 months ago:

@wd5gnr

I’m happy to see that you were able to answer your own question. Please let us know if there is something further we can address!

- Baillee