Some advice relating to hosting

[MrEyes]

Hello all,

I am currently experiencing some problems with my vBulletin server host, and the answers I am getting back from support just don't seem to add up. Not being an expert on these things I need some advice before I start ranting and end up being made to look stupid.

I run a fairly popular forum, average user/guests online is ~120 during normal hours (7am to 1am), dropping to ~5 during early morning hours (1am -> 7am). My current stats are:

• Most users ever online was 170, 26-02-08 at 16:04.
• Threads: 5,162
• Posts: 116,632
• Members: 1,245
• Posts per day: 116,632 / 90 = ~1295
• Threads per day: 5,162 / 90 = ~57

(Division by 90 as the forum is only 3 months old)

I also run the following mods/changes:

• Custom template changes to display Adsense for all logged out users and threads over 15 days old
• Arcade (70 games)
• Casino
• vBulletin Blog
• vBadvanced CMPS

So nothing out of the ordinary there.

Now all this runs on a Linux VPS server with the following relevant setup:

• Disk Space : 15gb (I currently use 24% of this)
• Monthly Bandwidth : 300gb (I currently use ~2.5 gb a day, so I am 75% under the cap)
• Guaranteed Ram : 384mb
• Burstable Ram : 1gb

So that’s the background, on to the actual problem...

Since setting up the server a few months ago, early morning users have reported that they occasionally get the following error:

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 786432) (tried to allocate 1966080 bytes) in /home/primarysite/public_html/XXXX on line YYYY

Where XXXX is a random page within the site and YYYY is a random line number. Also the "allocated" and "allocate" numbers are obviously different on each error report.

In the last few days I have started to receive the same report from users who are on the site during normal hours. This tends to happen for 5 to 10 minutes and then the problem disappears for a few days and then comes back.

At face value the cause of this seems obvious, the VPS is running out of memory and moving to a higher specced VPS package will resolve this.

However...

The numbers here just don't add up. Let me explain, this error has been reported (by users) at:

• 5th March 2008 @ ~8pm (GMT) - At this time there were ~100 users/guests online.
• [numerous dates] @ ~1am to ~3am (GMT) - Typically at this time there are no more than 5 users/guests online.

However, the site has been working fine at:

• 26th February 2008 @ 16:04 - At this time there were 170 users/guests online. This is around 60% load more than when the server failed on the 5th, and around 98% more than the early morning outages.
• [most days] @ ~10am -> ~4pm) - Average users/guests online is around 120 (at the time of writing there are 111).

If this was the "face value" memory issue I would not have expected the server to be able to handle the additional load of the 26th February, or the average daily load and would expect it to easy handle the load during early morning hours. However this is not the case which is why I say that the numbers do not add up.

I have to admit that I am no VPS expert, however I am not aware of any cron jobs or processes running at these times, also after reviewing server logs there have been numerous incidents of privvmpages hitting alert levels at the time these reports occur

In addition to this, until setting up the VPS account at the beginning of February 08 this site was running on a no bells and whistles $10 a month shared hosting package and was handling the load without any problems. The reason for moving to VPS was that I have plans to start attracting more users and did not want the community to experience outages. These "plans" are not yet in place so the load currently being placed on the VPS is near as dammit the same load as I was placing on the shared hosting package. I would have expected the VPS to hold up a lot better considering that it is almost 5 times more expensive. I realise that VPS and Shared hosting are two entirely different things, but I am sure you understand where I am coming from when I say that this VPS should be able to handle the same load, and more, than a two bit shared hosting package.

Now all this has been reported to the host and they seem to have ignored the “just doesn’t add up” part and gone down the route of “shared isn’t VPS” (fair enough) and “you will have to upgrade”. They also suggested that the ~5 users at 1am were somehow generating more server load than the 170 that the server coped with only a few days ago. This is a response that I am not entirely happy with, however as mentioned above I need to get my facts straight before going back and ranting at them. I am also more than happy to be told here (as you are independent) that the host is right and I am killing the server with load (although it would be nice to see how these numbers add up).

I realise that one solution would be to find a better host, but I would rather not go there unless absolutely necessary as I don’t want to put the community through another server upheaval after only having done one 5 weeks ago.

So, if you are still with me thanks for reading this far, do you have any suggestions/ideas/comments?