Last updated on February 12, 2017
…because I’m too fed up to do anything else about it.
For the past several months I’ve had no end of fun with my VPS. This site, and more importantly, my photography site pointsinfocus.com have been experiencing random downtime. Worst yet, I can almost always bring down the VPS simply by making a post on Points in Focus.
The thing is, I can’t find any damn reason this should be happening. I’ve been monitoring memory usage on my development server, running identical plugins and software and I never exceed my VPS’s memory limits, I don’t even get close. Even running top on the VPS nets nothing intelligent, always showing several 10s of MB of memory free at least, then blam, I get disconnected as the VPS’s processes are killed, VPS is inaccessable. Only by the time that happens, there’s no good reason why, so far as I can tell. The VPS never exceeds the allocated/available RAM, and CPU load is neglegable as well.
I get the feeling that somehow something, even though I can’t figure out what, is exceeding some instantaneous limit, and triggering the process killer. But given the tools available and the fact that the after the processes are killed there’s no way to get access to the /proc/PID/status to get the high water mark either it’s kind of frustrating to try and solve. Of course, even increasing the VPS’s available RAM doesn’t seem to help.
You know, I get the whole idea of VPSes and memory limits, but seriously if you’re going to kill people’s processes because they hit their limits, then the least you could do is provide them with some information about what triggered the kill. Better yet, would be to make the limit “soft” enough that they could actually see what’s actually going on with the tools available.
Sigh….
Someday I’ll have to open a ticket with Dreamhost about this, but not today…