CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We have a light use site.  currently on drupalvaluehosting and performance is excellent.  we are intersted in going to a VPS and wondered if anyone has explored RAM requirements on a VPS.  Is 256 doable?  512?  Some have burstable to 1GB.  Have people used a VPS for Civi? 
thanks,

S.

I've never used a VPS, but that seems pretty low - is that for the entire LAMP distribution too?   Have you used a VPS before?  It's definitely great news.  vps.net let's you start low and add as you need, so perhaps I'll just give the low end a try and ratchet up. 

Thanks!

S.

Got it - That makes sense - but wondering about any real-world examples. I'm sure there are other folks using a VPS solution. At any rate, I'll be happy to share any learnings when we convert, but I'm trying to size it.

That is VERY helpful - thanks!  Any other suggestions using VPS?

I now have our site (Drupal 6/CiviCRM 2.2) up and running on VPS.net:
I started running us on 1 node - (0.6Ghz 376 RAM) and the site would run, but I we started needing swap memory within the first 12 hrs of regular use. 

Scaling up as needed, we are now living happily with 3 nodes (1.8Ghz 1128MB RAM) at the moment without needing swap.

As far as site traffic here's a snapshot:
50-80 people on the site at any give time, with peaks of 100+ periodically.
Apache: 0.33 and 0.35 requests per second.
MySQL: 2 and 4 connected threads with between 80 and 100 open files.
Processor Load: typically between .2 and .5

RAM: Apache will use whatever RAM you give it for cache so we average 756Mb non-cached at any give point
Swap: Consistently none.
(These stats are thanks to ServerDensity.com - take a look, it's very worth it!)

@elifarley

As stated above, you should only need 128MB Memory (maybe 256, but not 1200) limit in your /etc/php.ini
Total RAM available on your VPS is different. You want more than one visitor on your website at a time, right?

Also, maybe you should start a new thread rather than piggybacking on this one?

There are a few other factors besides memory But i do think a small scale VPS should suffice for this

Would be great if you can publish your recipe so that other ASYO / Viking / Soccer leagues around the country can use it

Ping us on IRC if you need help. Since i have kids who love soccer, i'd love to see a good open source solution that leagues can use

lobo

The Drupal core Aggregator module caused our site, which has CiviCRM as part of it, to require a VPS to perform the upgrade from D5 to D6. The upgrade to D6 would fail as Drupal cron was not allowed to complete by our hosting provider. Also Civi cron tasks were impossible to run already on D5 on shared hosting as our provider is very tight on Cron tasks and CPU utilization.

So on the VPS with D6 and latest at the time Civi, I ended up having to restrict search engine robots from going through /civicrm/ url's as the spiders alone were consuming about 400MB of memory on the server. In total, our Ubuntu VPS draws right around 512MB or RAM, and before I put that restriction in the typical draw was 900MB. Spiders were going through our "Rolodex" list of organizations our site happens to host. (Not the core purpose of our site, so definitely not deserving of 400MB of RAM!) And that 512MB is for three websites (1 Drupal 6, 1 small Drupal 5, and 1 static HTML) and a minimal installation of GNU Mailman. EMail is hosted on other servers.

I would suggest AVOIDING VPS's powered by Virtuozzo. Our current one is, and there are a number of limitations Virtuozzo imposes. I am looking to move to a Xen powered provider which Xen is able to install Ubuntu directly from the official ISO CD image Ubuntu distributes... no proprietary modifications to the distro. I have heard that VMware is also able to host from the official ISO images, but I have yet to see a provider using a VMware virtualization product.