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I have a little dedicated server. It's at a cheap price and has a simple AMD 1800+ (1.5ghz), 256mb DDR RAM, ...need I continue? And I think I'm overloading it already.

I have installed the following, and it's running CentOS 5.4:

  • Webmin
  • Apache
  • MySQL
  • Subversion as an Apache module
  • Hudson (standalone)
  • Sonar (standalone, runs with a standalone Jetty install)
  • Artifactory (standalone)

That's pretty much it. But I'm having problems; pages are loading quite slowly. Network speed of the server is excellent, but I think I'm just running out of CPU and/or memory. A side-effect of the pages loading slowly is that sometimes Hudson times out, not being able to start Maven or contact Sonar in a certain amount of time.

I think the next step to speed things up might be to move to an application server and use the WAR version of Hudson, Sonar and Artifactory together on that server. I don't know that it will help, but it just seems to make sense, especially with Sonar running on its own Jetty install and the other two probably running their own mini application servers as well. Am I correct in thinking this?

Is this the right course of action? Any other tips on how to make the server run faster? I can post more data if you'd like, just let me know what else would help you answer my question.

Oh, also just to cure any suspicions, I don't have any sort of virus or spyware. I protect my SSH access with DenyHosts (which has blocked 300+ brute forcers in the past few months), and I have confirmed that the top four processes in terms of memory and CPU usage are Sonar, Artifactory, Hudson, and MySQL.

Edit: I just thought of another thing that I'd like you to comment on as well: Apache currently has 8 spawned slave processes, taking 42MB of ram apiece. This is not my web server. Is everything else able to function if I shut down Apache? Can you point me towards a tutorial or something on migrating Subversion from Apache into something that might work along with the other three applications, maybe even make Subversion a WAR file or something?

Edit2: Okay, I shut down Apache and things are a bit faster, I'm struggling to get svnserve working. But still no response? Does anyone have any tips? :-\

Ricket
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5 Answers5

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First off, run top, and see where your ram is going. Note that top will not report shared memory correctly. Check out tops options, you can sort by almost anything.

If nothing else, you could cut down the number of processes Apache runs, jut check its config file, I've done that, but the probably will all be pushed to swap, and so will not matter.

I'm thinking that you need more ram, and there just isn't much else to it. You could get faster swap (sure, get an SATA card, and a small fast flash drive.....right, cheaper to replace everything).

More ram. Your java stuff demands it.

Ronald Pottol
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You need more memory. 256MB is inadequate, and you are undoubtedly swapping like crazy.

You don't say what OS you are using, but assuming Linux, do a free at the command line, and look at the "swap" line. If the "used" column is large, or the "free" column small, that's your problem.

Jeff Leyser
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  • I do actually say I'm using CentOS, so yes, Linux. Unfortunately this is a dedicated server provided by a hosting company, so I can't add more RAM. And besides, it's really cheap and I'm not locked in, so if I can't get things working as I want then I will upgrade to something with more RAM in it. Thanks though, free does show a significant amount of used swap space, as expected. – Ricket Mar 15 '10 at 05:07
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Turns out Artifactory was using tons of RAM and CPU and slowing everything down. After disabling it, speeds increased by 2-3x which is definitely acceptable.

I also shut down Apache and am working on configuring svnserve to my needs; it should be more lightweight as well.

To get any more performance out of this server, I'm sure I would have to upgrade its RAM, and that's not an option right now, so I'm happy to have it in an usable state, even if I had to drop Artifactory (SVN, Hudson and Sonar are the most important pieces anyway).

Edit: And svnserve didn't work out after all; I am completely opposed to it requiring plaintext passwords. I'm back to Apache, but the server is still running smooth. Artifactory was taking a lot of power!

Sonar also takes a lot of power, but it's well worth it.

Ricket
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I cant imagine what solution you really expect to find here mate .. with so tiny amount of ram i see only huge effort for very small result. It is just plain easy - pay a bit of cash to get more RAM!

moo
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Sonar is very hungry for RAM, its slow with 1GiB, acceptable with 4GiB and ok with 8GiB.

mbx
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