I finally got sick of restoring from backup and moved to a different provider.

My forum users also report a speed increase, which was a nice surprise for me.
I also did the …
# cd /home
# time du -sh .
… test and never got more than 6 seconds as a result. In fact, the more I ran the test the faster results I got, typically 0.3 sec after a while.
As far as I understand, this is a shared server and both the processor and the disc volume are shared resources with other users, so I take this test with a pinch of salt, i.e. not very seriously.

I have absolutely no reason to defend gogaddy, looking at their email replies even less, but it could have been better if you told us the method you used to compare the various hosting companies instead of pointing only in the direction of rimuhosting. After all, what’s true today, may not be tomorrow so a method would be the best…
Thanks a lot for your blog, please do not take my words as a put down, I’m just trying to be constructive.

I feel like I got cheated.

root Wed Apr 08 (30:0) /
/> time du -hs
2.2G .

real 3m15.120s
user 0m0.147s
sys 0m1.997s

I really want to try another server, but on Rumuhosting, I get stuck on:

Linux Distribution Centos5 (RimuHosting Recommended Distro)
Debian 4.0 (aka Etch)
Debian 5.0 (aka Lenny)
Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex, from 2008-10)
Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron, 5 yr long term support (LTS))
Fedora 10

See our distros page for more information about each distro option.

- What should I choose? Whats the best one for me? I have a hosted big forum, with 20k members, 200 online each day, and 300-400 new users each day. What do you recommend me to get?

I was going to make a test with the one, that costs $29.95.

- 400 MB RAM
- 40 GB
- Where is the bandwidth???

If you get a new server with more resources (and no turbopanel to suck up the resources you do have) MySql should work.

I woked up and my site was giving “database error” like always. So I went to Simple Panel again to activate MySQL (as I told you before, it always getting automatically disabled). But after activating MySQL I still get database error and on my Simple Panel it says that its ON.

I tried all things but seems that my site is still having “database error”. Restarted server, cleaned things and still same error. Never happened to me before, as I followed your suggestions. I normally was activating MySQL and shuting down the Panel real fast in order to have my site OK, but now, nothing works :S.

Do you have any ideas why this could be? And I tried Rumuhosting, but I dont know what Panel to have installed on my Server, what you recommend me?

And I dont know how to make a database backup on godaddy, as I dont have that option on Panel and I cant enter site right now.

Im really desesperate with them, cause I dont want to restore and old database made 5 months ago

You can try to initiate a reboot of your system through go daddy’s interface and then immediately stop simple control panel to free up additional resources. I have noticed that simple control panel does seem to hoard memory over time, so reboot and get in and you should be good.

In the long run, if you have a forum that generates revenue I would not recommend hosting it at GoDaddy. If it is not one thing with them it is another. You might want to check out the host I moved to last month – Not only are the cheaper, but they have support engineers that are really good (compared to godaddy which just sells you stuff)

Rumuhosting VPS hosting

Seems that they answered my e-mail and support ticket and they told me the following things:

Thank you for contacting Server Support.

We were able to successfully gain root access to your server via SSH using the log in information on file. The root password of your server would allow you to gain root access to the server via SSH. Any password resets performed from within the Hosting Control Center would reset this password and not the password used to gain access via Simple Control panel.

After investigating this issue, it appears that the underlying issue is your server has run too low on memory. When accessing the MySQL log, the following errors were found:

090315 8:08:54 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 1048548 bytes)
090315 8:08:55 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 1048548 bytes)
090315 8:09:06 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 1048548 bytes)
090315 8:09:08 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 1048548 bytes)
090315 8:09:13 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 1048548 bytes)
090315 8:09:14 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed 1048548 bytes)

Low memory can cause issues with many services including ftp, mysql and control panel related issues. You can review this via the root user in SSH by executing the command ‘top.’

By reviewing the RES column (how much memory a process is taking of your allotted RAM), you can see how much of your memory resources are being taken up by these processes and compare that to the amount of guaranteed RAM you have. While Virtual servers do have bursted RAM, this additional RAM is not consistently available so it should not be factored into your calculations for how much RAM that is always available for use. If you routinely exceed your guaranteed RAM allotment, FTP services, mysql instances, control panel requests – all these can fail and require restart, which will only temporarily fix the symptoms. You can also stop those services that you are not using in order to free up some memory.

The longterm fix for this issue is either moving to a virtual dedicated server with greater amounts of guaranteed RAM or a dedicated server.

Please contact us if you have any further issues.

Nathan A.
Server Support

————————————————————

The problem is that I cant access my Panel to execute SSH.

I tried to program above that you posted, but seems that doesnt work for me. When I enter password, its says: wrong password, wtc.

Dont know what more to do . 3 days and my site is still down. Im losing a bunch of members and visits.

Im having the following problems with them and seems that their support isnt giving me some good solutions. They said me to restart server, but seems like the problem is still there .

I upgraded to virtual dedicated 3-4 days ago and moved my database to the new one. (90MB of db).

All went succesful and site was running much faster with 10.000 users online. The problem camed after some hours. I was navigating trough internet and then suddenly my inbox of hotmail was full of messages from users on site, telling me that they are getting database error message.

So I checked out my settings in Simple Panel and saw that MySQL was disabled. Well I enable it again and after some hours same problem. Seems that MySQL is getting automatically disabled and site goes down . And today my Simple Panel is out. I mean that now I cant access Simple Panel :S. Im getting : out of connection error. Cannot connect to this server.

I sended them an e-mail again, and I so mad about their hosting. I upgraded my site because they recommended me to do it, because its good for bigger sites and forums. And now that I did it, 4 days have passed and lots a lot of users and visits . Even my members are getting pissed of and dont know if they will come back.

What do you think about all this? Any solution on how to fix the MySQL automatic disable?

The problem now is I cant access my Simple Panel and sended them an e-mail about it. Im so desesperate.

I should had change the hosting time before listening to them….

I still like a GUI and found starting and stopping a little cumbersome so I searched high and low for a open source version of turbopanel or cpanel and found Webmin.com. Installed smoothly with the RPM and will not make any changes to your server on install. I’m experimenting with possible issues of turbopanel.conf with changes made in Webmin.

/sbin/chkconfig turbopanel off (and)
/sbin/chkconfig tomcat55 off

chkconfig is not recognized:
+bash: chkconfig: command not found

When running yum install chkconfig, it tells it has already been installed:

Any idea what the default location of chkconfig is?
Thanks,
Erwin

I’ve been having the same problem with my VDS at http://www.listier.com . I’m getting the error below:

(Error : Exceed Memory limit. Require : 56.59 MByte)

I have 512 and 2GB burst. I was told to reboot the server, but the reboot took 6 hours and 10 minutes. and the problem still there. I would try following your recommendation to see if I can fix GoDaddy VDS.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the interesting blog. As someone told, you need to have the patience and dedication to make a technical article interesting. You have done so! Kudos.

I was suddenly facing with this out of memory error when doing a php proc_open(), on the godaddy VDS and contacted their support. They did recommend me to restart the turbopanel. For heavns sake I am hosting only one domain and that too I am the only user since the site is still under testing.

I never took these services seriously until I started to run out of memory. Of course I then googled ‘turbopanel’ and there your article showed in the top few results! I have decided to turn off turbopanel now, since I will rarely use it. I know linux fairly well and I will always be using the SSH and doing things from command line. So I can safely turn off the turbopanel.

Also I followed your suggestion and installed numactl and did memhog 200m. I hope that helps free up some memory.

I went ahead and did a check of all services that run under /etc/init.d by doing the following shell script serviceStatus.sh.

#!/bin/sh
for service in `ls /etc/init.d`
do
/etc/init.d/$service status
done

Then I ran the script and grepped for running processes which showed the following:

./serviceStatus.sh |grep running
crond (pid 7845) is running…
cyrus-master (pid 1923) is running…
httpd (pid 32440 22099 25724) is running…
mysqld (pid 8107) is running…
xfers running: 0
server is up and running
master (pid 1598) is running…
saslauthd (pid 7989 7981) is running…
sshd (pid 13452 25850 29784 32722 17837) is running…
syslogd (pid 7885) is running…
xinetd (pid 18052) is running…

I am trying to identify which of those above services are necessary and which aren’t. On a quick skim the one that stuck me is “cyrus-master (pid 1923) is running…” and that seemed to show up frequently on the top of ‘top’ command. On doing a further research I figured that it has to do with IMAP/POP emails and stuff (http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/generalinfo.html#imap) , which I guess I don’t need for now. So I am going to turn it off too.

/etc/init.d/cyrus-imapd stop
Shutting down cyrus-imapd: [ OK ]
Exporting cyrus-imapd databases:

I don’t know what is with the ‘exporting the database’. It took a minute or so to get done.

Checking on other services, it seems all of them like sshd, mysqld, httpd etc. are needed. I will keep them going for now.

I rarely do much maintenance of the server other than installing some needed packages once in a while. Do you recommend any routine maintenance or cleaning up etc. of the server? Are there any recommended routine checks to be done? Do you know how to do it? Please share any ideas you might have or what you have figured out on that.

Good luck to everyone!
later,
trbr

That is weird that they are taking so long. I know when I ordered mine I got it that night.

Are you still using Godaddy’s VDS?
I just ordered one but didnt order Cpanel. I wanted to know if your experience has been any better or worse. It seems that If I want to order a cpanel it is going to take even longer for me to have an active server, its already been 24hrs and nowhere to be seen.

Any other feedback you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Here’s my deal: I want to run tomcat, and simple control panel does seem to help me in a lot of areas I don’t know. I happened to know java, a friend wanted a business site and somehow I’ve become the developer and the system admin.

I don’t know the first thing about servers, my dog knows a little less about Linux than i do.

I of course want to learn, but the time just isn’t available right now. using the commands from the article can I just stop and start simple control panel when I need it so my instance of tomcat server isn’t dragged down?

thanks,
Jay

I am presently having a similar problem with GoDaddy where they are now trying to upsell me to a higher plan rather than solve the following:

Recently, myself and two others who download MP3 files via Podcast from a particular Web site that GoDaddy hosts, are being throttled based on our source IP addresses; I handle the Podcasts for this site as well as do backups. So my FTP as well as iTunes downloads went from normal speed to about 9-10 kbps. The files aren’t that large, around 55 MB at the high end.

One of us went to our neighbor’s wireless network to download and got regular speeds, but when he went back to his home network, he got maybe 9-10 kbps. GoDaddy initially told us to clear our cache, then proceeded to try to sell us on upgrading our Web server to a dedicated plan.

Questions: do you know if GoDaddy or any other Web hosting company throttles based on IP source addresses; and anre there tools that we can use to collect forensics to show if we are being throttled? GoDaddy would never admit this, but I want to be sure that this is what they are doing. Also, isn’t throttling illegal and/or breaks a Web hosting agreement?

Thanks,
Kevin

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for contacting customer support.

The turbopanel service (Simple Control Panel) had failed because the server did not have any available memory to allocate to the control panel. Tomcat and Apache were using most of the available memory and was causing the issue. A reboot of the server has corrected the issue however if this occurs again you will need to stop or limit the amount of memory being allocated to your services or consider moving to a new server with higher memory limits.

Please contact us if you have any further issues.

Thanks for writing this article.

I have started a dedicated server package there with GOdaddy….
I cant find the tomcat root there ….can u suggest me where its present….I have logged in as root to the server with ssh.Yet could not find the root.

tomcat is in /usr/java/tomcat

where is the web-apps specifically?

Would u suggest?

Robert

I encountered the exact same memory problem that you described (and got the same form letter it sounds like) and am now setting up my “new” 512 MB RAM virtual dedicated server, having fallen for their sales/tech answer to my problem.

I’ve implemented your solutions on my old server and the new one. No probs so far!

But do I understand correctly that if I changed from Simple Control Panel to another one of the options they offer, the memory problem won’t persist, and I can avoid this hassle of having to stop/restart through SSH all the time?

Also, re the argument from the pretty rude “doomtints” (#31 above): One of the sites I have on my server gets thousands of hits *per day* (it’s a blog using Expression Engine), and I have a massive incoming spam email problem, in addition to lots of legitimate emails which I totally rely on and have to check constantly through MS Outlook Express. Could that guy’s remarks about email argue for a separate server for email?

Thanks again Colin. Great work!

Disabling the memory hog fixed the server slowdown but its still serving pages slowly. Looks like theres some amount of bandwidth or connection throttling somewhere, or it needs optimization.

I haven’t tried to run the same app on my server server at home. It is much more powerful but,

Also, all the resource use were WAY under the limit. doomtints, pls brush up on ur attitude, and stop throwing commands out of your linux for dummies book.

I do not consider my self a Linux geek, but I have manage to maintain my own VPS for about 5 years. Since I have not updated my VPS since I started I am probably paying the most expensive and less competitive VPS package on the market (I started with what used to be Interlard and was bough by web.com sucks!). Saying this, I am now in the process of choosing the new VPS, reason why I ended up reading this outstanding blog.

I was wondering if you may please provide me with any hint as to whether or not goodady should I go with goodady VDS (I can assume you don’t like it too much, but honestly, is among the cheapest ones in the market reason why it results very attractive to many, including me!).

I own about 20 accounts (domains) and offer to each account most common services such as email (pop3, imap, smtp and webmail), ftp, mysql; my concern if whether or not godaddy VDS offers all of this services independently to each domain (specially the email services… in other words, does it includes a mail server such as qmail and sendmail??). Most of the accounts do not have a lot of traffic, but one specifically is very somewhat popular and receives about 2000 hits a day! (all my apps are LAMP based!)

On the other hand, I am also attracted to other VPS plans such as the ones offered in 1and1.com and linode.com! any feedback on these plans??

Any help will be most welcomed!

Cheers,

Luis

My for domains have moderate traffic, with around 8,000 views a month right now. Its nothing to laugh at, but small beans in the grand scheme of things.

One tool that I recommend for windows users SFTP’ing data is winscp. It is very similar to common FTP programs and should be pretty easy to use for you.

I’m just a small-time developer who likes to provide hosting for my clients. I bought a Godaddy VPS because i needed one more IP for a client’s SSL cert, and that would’ve made my shared reseller account cost as much as a GoDaddy VPS. My first impression is that it’s a dog right out of the box, which is why i Googled for articles such as this one. It takes almost two minutes to connect to the FTP server, and randomly anywhere from ten seconds to a half-minute to change directories. Same behavior is exhibited in SCP.

Using one test page with four images i can see significant difference in speed between the GoDaddy server and my overloaded old shared hosting. I’m really wondering if i did the right thing, and i’ve got a very mportant account waiting while i’m wondering where to install his certificate. When you speak of your troubles with “only four domains” are you giving an extreme example as a point of reference? I mean, i’ve got at least fifteen well-trafficked sites and two busy php forums… the specs would indicate i should have about ten times the resources of my shared server, but your server is throwing errors with four static sites… um… sorry… this is a question and i’m not articulating it well because i’m getting flustered.

Sorry for the long post. I’m going now to check out the advice most graciously given here, but meanwhile would you have any advice as to how one might transfer files to and from the server via SCP or SFTP when everything belongs to “root” but you have to log in with your username? File operations are really clumsy from a PuTTY terminal.

I am glad that you were able to contribute to the conversation here, but the issue you are describing is not and has not occurred on my server. I run 3 word press driven sites, and one instance of a mail server. This is well within the bounds of what a virtual server should be able to handle.

I could post every detailed debug, and change this site from a blog that tries to explain complex technologies in a voice that most people can understand into a site thats only purpose is to show the world that I am smart and they aren’t. Frankly I chose not to. If you disagree with that choice, the internet is a big place, and you are free to write your own articles with your own opinions.

- You keep saying you have a VDS, but with the specs I can see that you clearly have a VPS.

- You still didn’t understand what I stated. Virtuozzo puts hard limits on the number of open files that can be open on a VPS, after that it won’t allow new processes to start. This is different from any “Linux” limit which I don’t think exists, but may of course limit performance if too many files are open. You would probably agree that what you ran into with your error messages isn’t a performance issue. Your response to me makes me think that you still don’t understand what I told you.

Look at /proc/user_beancounters on your VPS and you will see exactly what I’m talking about. Very likely the plan you have is the standard $30 plan at most providers, which means you have an open file limit of around 8196. If you have ever used the ‘lsof’ command in Linux, then you know that a standard Linux installation can easily have 2000-4000 files open even when apparently idle. Add in a mailing list, a lot of email traffic, or a lot of setup/maintenance activity and you can see that you’ll be hitting that limit fairly quickly.

- Sure, you helped people, but you didn’t fix the real problem that you were having or that they were having, as you haven’t yet identified the problem. Godaddy’s advice to you, which you have attacked, was better advice. Why are you attacking Godaddy’s advice but then a little offended when someone attacks yours? If someone is hitting the resource limit with the VPS plan they bought, the best advice for a service provider to give is to upgrade as opposed to disabling services. Sure, experts can disable services that they don’t need, but even then they are not “fixing” the problem with Virtuozzo! The problem with a hard limit on open files could still recur!

Play a little bit with Virtuozzo or, better yet, OpenVZ (the free version) and you will find that you were off on the wrong track here.

My troubleshooting was pretty specific, and my solutions have helped people with similar problems on their servers. I think that passes any reasonable persons litmus test for a correct solution.

I would hope that you would learn that putting down someone else technically does not elevate yourself, it actually lowers peoples opinions of you. Everyone has to learn this lesson early in their careers, and once they do, that humility is a firm foundation build on.

Also, certifications don’t make the man. I know some brilliant engineers with no certifications to their names, as well as amazing engineers who have more certs then they know what to do with.

In my case certifications are a necessary part of consulting. They are important in that they prove at a base level that you understand that vendors product, as well as providing a way to learn more about a product or technology (yes, I actually learn something new every time I have to cert or recert on a product). If you question my experience on a product or technology, please feel free to check out my resume. You will find that I am just passing 10 years of experience with Unix and Routing / Switching technologies. While that doesn’t mean I know it all ( I learn something new every day), it does provide me with a decent base of knowledge and experience that I apply every day to learning and understanding new technologies.

From my experience, it is email that causes this problem for most people. If you are using your VPS for email, don’t POP very often and don’t run a mailing list.

You can look at /proc/user_beancounters to see how many files you have open and also to see how many other resources you are using. The next time you have this error, look at this file and I bet you will see that you are over the resource limit for something.

You claim to be a computer geek but this seems to be new territory for you. I’m not a godaddy fan by any means. so I’m not defending them, but with all your certifications this post makes you look like a nOOb.

Is this right or am I missing something. How much RAM does tomcat take up also?

Generally speaking my server is performing far much better after turning off and disabling the Simple control panel.

Are you saying that cron requires java to run?
I might be wrong, but I am pretty sure that I have had cron jobs running in the past without having installed java on a server (logratate, etc).

When you turn off tomcat you affect cron jobs because they rely on Java to run. So you might need to keep tomcat running so your cron jobs wont be affected.

It is not easy to write technical articles to be easy to read for beginners and also interesting for technical users.

I hope that I can learn from your blog how to write good user manuals for my user audience.

Greetings from Vienna, Robert

GoDaddy is a great company and the Virtual Server is a good inexpensive service, but in all honesty, the overhead of these operating systems and all the applications is just too much for the amount of RAM memory allocated on their plans..

Sidenote: I just got a LINODE Virtual Server.. great deal at just 19.95 a month and PLENTY of RAM.. the Server really ROCKS.. but again, this is definitely not for beginners.. you really have to know linux to fool around here.

Cheers,
Bob

First things first, make sure you followed the step in the above article that says to install it by issuing -

yum install numactl

this installs the package that memhog is distributed in.

Next, if you have numactl installed, then you might have a path issue. Try executing memhog by explicitly calling out the path –

/usr/bin/memhog 200m

This should get you going in the right direction.

–Colin

and I have a little better understand of YUM..

Thanks!

the only thing I can not figure out is how to run the “memhog 200m” command again. Maybe I am not in the right directory to run the command?

Cheers,
Bob

I used your remedy.. it worked fine.. Now my little email programs are working again. When people write me about saxophones I have a small auto-responder. Of course like you said C-Panel running in the background was HOGGING all the memory.

Anyway, just a few questions if you don’t mind?

After installing “yum install numactl” I can’t seem to figure out how to get it to display the memory information again. I can’t figure out the commands.

Also, the “memhog 200m” command worked the very first time.. but now the BASH says there is no such command when I try and run it. I am stumped??

I don’t want Tomcat or C-Panel to restart automatically. I want to leave it off.. I tried running the 2 commands:

chkconfig turbopanel off (and)
chkconfig tomcat55 off

Bash says again there are no such commands..

Sorry to be a pain. If you can help I would appreciate it. I would like to be able to use these commands from time to time.

YOUR WEB SITE ROCKS!!

Cheers,
Bob

The reason for memhog, is that with the 2.6 Linux kernel a feature was introduced that allowed the kernel to utilize unused pages in main memory to cache IO requests to connected block devices.

This creates a tagging of pages in memory, tags for memory that can be over written and tags for pages that cannot be overridden.

I don’t really know why, but with the move from 2.4 to 2.6 I have seen memory issues move from leaks requiring a reboot to memory getting tagged but not released. I have found that using memhog to “force” pages to be released works well to address this issue. I admit it is a total hack, but it has proved useful in a pinch.

See http://www.unixville.com/~moazam/stories/2004/05/17/maxpermsizeAndHowItRelatesToTheOverallHeap.html

For everyone who’s read this post, I’ve found this wiki that we could use to share more experiences about managing godaddy’s VPS:
http://godaddyvds.wikispaces.com/

Decided to buy a new godaddy vds rather than re-provision my old one as they tried to get me to do (turns out I was paying 34.99 instead of 29.99 for the privilege of being such an old, loyal customer) with their 4 bullet point documentation.

Opted for Centos5 rather than FC7 — just ’cause you did- and YOU know what you’re doing. Did check to make sure Plesk 8 supported it first… I’m not that lame.

Followed your tutorial to learn how to have shell access. Yummy.

All in all, a jolly good google story to tell the grandkids someday.

Earlier today when I followed your instructions, I saw my free memory skyrocket as expected — from about 50,000k to 200,000k.

Now, it’s seems thing are back to bad. Here’s my Mem line from top command:

Mem: 8145020k total, 8118540k used, 26480k free, 34056k buffers

The weird thing is, tomcat is not running. In fact, when I sort the results by the %MEM column, only about 10 process are using any memory and they are all 0.3 or lower.

I rebooted, but it didn’t change the situation. Any ideas?

TIA,
j

I am in the process of moving all the domains to one of the boxes so I can upgrade the OS on the older one and use it as a dev server. As I got more and more domains moved onto the newer box, I definitely noticed the page load times were getting slower. In fact, a lot slower.

So, I ssh’d into the box, ran the top command, and made the exact same eye-popping discovery that you did – tomcat was eating all my memory! Unfortunately for me, I had no idea why or what to do about it.

Thank you so much for this post. I followed your instructions to the letter and everything worked perfectly. My pages are now snappy as ever

Best,
j

I think you made a mistake at the begining of the post, the $29,99 month package comes with 256 MB of memory instead of 512.

I would really apreaciate if you can explain me how to verify if the memhog command really worked, when I run the top command I don’t know how to read the stats at the because of the numbers, I don’t see 256 MB total, 180 MB used… I do know how to sort by %MEM, that gives me clear picture of what is using the most memory.

I’m considering upgrading to cPanel, but I hate to put more money in their pockets.