I installed ISPConfig on Digital Ocean's $5 deal. The server has 1GB of memory, but 74% of it is already used up after installing ISPConfig. It is probably running a lot of unnecessary services that I need to get rid of. All I really need is Apache, MySQL and maybe some Firewall type services, the rest can go. I don't need a mail server at all. How do I strip down my ISPConfig server to the essentials only?
If you have a new setup, I would suggest to start over from a fresh install and only install the services you need. Will be much cleaner, otherwise you could experience all kinds of problems if the services are not removed properly. 1GB of RAM is not super much today for a server ...
if you don't need eg mail, or dns, then don't install any of the postfix or bind stuff. I assume you're following one of the tutorials. just install the bits you need, eg apache, MySQL, pure-ftp. install the quota stuff if you need it, don't if you don't. and when you say 74% of the memory is being used, is it really being used? the OS will assign as much as it can for the buffer/cache, that doesn't mean that it's being used and is unavailable. just that it's there and available to use for caching. If, eg apache or php needs more memory available to it, the cache memory will be released to that process. and if you think ispconfig is using too much memory, try using Plesk with only 1Gb of ram, now that's a real resource hog....
I compared ISPConfig to VestaCP. I have VestaCP installed on another server, which allows me to disable all unneeded processes from the control panel, and it uses 33% of total memory. So, I was hoping that ISPConfig had the same sort option to just disable all the unused resources from the Control Panel.
There are actually no unneeded processes, all processes that are running are required to provide the features that you have chosen at install time. A full featured server with web, mail and DNS should have about 2GB RAM if you want to use it in production. This RAM is not used by ISPConfig btw, so the title to lighten up ISPConfig is a bit misleading as ISPConfig is not the problem here. Most RAM is used by the antivirus system, followed by the antispam system. As @Steini86 @nhybgtvfr mentioned in their posts, you should not have installed software that you don't want to use in the first place.
If we are filtering email in front of ISPConfig (using Proxmox mail gateway) and using Cloudflare for DNS, would it be wise to omit ClamAV, Spamassassin & Bind when following The Perfect Server - Debian 10 (Nginx, BIND, Dovecot, ISPConfig 3.1) ?
It is hard to answer this because it depends on your setup and only you can decide that. If you are not using Bind, you can remove it (and use unbound as a local dns resolver). Is clamav and spamassassin effectively filtering any mails for your server (do you get spam/scam through your mail gateway which is then filtered by amavis?) If not, then it is useless and can be removed.
