Hi! After installing (in which I ran into some errors, but that's another matter), the server is slow or unresponsive. Is there some minimal RAM requirements? It didn't see anything on that. I have a minimal droplet with 512MB right now. There is stuff running with a virtual memory value like: rspamd: 82744, systemd: 222884, PassengerAgent: 587020, redis-server: 67244 Five different "php-fpm" versions that have a value around 258792. I don't know if things running with high values has to do with the failed installation or if it is the server that needs a higher RAM. Do you have some guidance on that? It would be nice to know what things are running and how much default memory it will use.
Depends on what you installed. A full system with web + email + DNS should have 2GB RAM or more. 512 MB is definitely not enough. You can have a small system with less than 2GB RAM, but then you should e.g. not install all PHP versions plus you need at least 2GB swap then and you can expect the system to be not that fast, as speed comes from caching things in RAM (e.g. MySQL does this and the Linux Kernel too). There is nothing running with high values, the defaults are very conservative and low. You just can't run a full-blown hosting, mail, and DNS server today with 512MB RAM on Linux.
Okay, thanks for the fast reply. I used the automatic installation: wget -O - https://get.ispconfig.org | sh -s -- --use-ftp-ports=40110-40210 --unattended-upgrades So I suppose I need to use more RAM and turn off some things. I didn't know that these php versions would need to run in the background with so much memory. But then there is this "Phusion Passenger" (PassengerAgent) which wasn't listed that uses 587MB, that's quite a lot. But maybe that's what the whole platform is built on? I like to make it minimal in resources, but the Passenger thing is not optional I suppose?
So you have chosen to install all available services and options, which results in a system that requires about 2GB ram or more. Take a look at the auto-install tutorial, you can instruct the installer find detail what you want to get installed incl. which PHP version you want to use: https://www.howtoforge.com/ispconfig-autoinstall-debian-ubuntu/ PHP-FPM is a daemon, so yes, it runs in the background if you have chosen to install it. No, ISPConfig does not use it. It's used for the Apache ruby module. If you don't need it, you can stop and remove it.
Yes I can redo the installing and pass some options then. But I would not have minded having mutiple php versions installed, just to be ready to use, but I definititely don't want them to use memory if I'm not using them. But maybe there it's possible to just stop those processes, I will have to look at it. On my local windows I have multiple php versions but there is nothing running unless I start the httpd.exe process manually. Ah, okay great.
Hmm wow basic droplet with 2GB of memory 12$ I usually do not recommend providers but uhm my thinking is, either you wanted to test or to save a buck. DO may have the more robust services and more functionality but if you do not need a reliable vlan... and do not plan to move domains to them or rely on their DNS, or support on the weekend ( cloud issue only ) Hetzner is pretty cheap with their smalles plan including 4gb of memory but you need to create swap partition manually or using cloud-init or use a local swap file Be aware though, new customers will have their MX port 25 block until after about first invoice or at least 1 month, one can request to get unblocked. Still compared to DO one would be able to save a few bucks imho. cloud instances themselves working pretty well at hetzner
I agree to what @ztk.me posted, you can get way more RAM for less money from other providers. This makes more sense than trying to trim down RAM usage as RAM is always needed as soon as you want to get a fast and responsive server, e.g., when your system uses a MySQL database for a website.
how much swappiness or swap range is ideal for ispconfig3? Also, can you assist in restricting or balancing the CPU usage for each client or domain? (ispconfig3)?
This value depends on the amount of RAM you have and your system load, not ISPConfig. For ISPConfig, you do not need swap at all and most of my systems do not have any swap. This can not be restricted per domain or client. But you can restrict the number of php-fpm processes per site on options tab and use this indirectly to restrict the load a site can handle and therefore restrict how much CPU resources it can use.