March 18, 2009 @ 1:36 am One thing I hated about WebHostingTalk is how much bad advice the so-called “professionals” are giving out to the world. Some poor college student asked in the VPS forums whether he is able to run 18 static HTML sites on VPSLink.com Link-1 plan (64MB RAM, 2.5GB storage & 100GB/month data), and the typical responses are:
“I do not believe you can host 18 websites on 64MB of RAM. I’d bump that up to at least 128 or 256.” –nexbyte
“I really wouldn’t advise anything lower than 265MB RAM for website hosting.” –RikeMedia
(Well, there are some more optimistic comments but I mainly list out those “with things to sell”)
So, just trying to prove the point that yes, 64MB is more than enough to host 18 static sites, I decided to add a Link-1 Xen to my account and document the process. Btw, thanks to Dan @ VPSLink for getting my billing issue resolved :) You can get 10% recursive discount here, or 66% off for the first 3 months here.
Setting Up the VPS
After my order has been provisioned, I re-image the server with a Debian 5 “Lenny” image. I normally pick Debian or Ubuntu because apt-get uses much less memory than RedHat/Fedora’s equivalent, and it’s also my personal preference. I named my new VPS “endor” as I usually just name my boxes after Star Wars systems. Re-imaging a VPS is pretty fast — 2 minutes later I have my root password sent to my email address so I can ssh in to set up the new system.
$ ssh root@endor
root@endor's password:
Linux 66671 2.6.18-53.1.13.el5xen #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 14:04:18 EST 2008 i686
endor:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 65704 64008 1696 0 5616 44100
-/+ buffers/cache: 14292 51412
Swap: 131064 0 131064
endor:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz
stepping : 13
cpu MHz : 2194.496
cache size : 2048 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc up pni monitor ds_cpl est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 5558.81
Plenty of free memory and a single core of C2Duo E4500 — although not a high-end Xeon CPU, but should be more than sufficient to do what we need it to do. The next thing I want to do is to make sure every package is up to date.
endor:~# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade Get:1 http://debrepo.mirror.vpslink.com lenny Release.gpg [386B] Get:2 http://debrepo.mirror.vpslink.com lenny Release [63.2kB] Get:3 http://debrepo.mirror.vpslink.com lenny/main Packages [5295kB] Get:4 http://security.debian.org lenny/updates Release.gpg [197B] Get:5 http://security.debian.org lenny/updates Release [40.8kB] Get:6 http://debrepo.mirror.vpslink.com lenny/contrib Packages [76.1kB] Ign http://security.debian.org lenny/updates/main Packages/DiffIndex Get:7 http://security.debian.org lenny/updates/contrib Packages [14B] Get:8 http://security.debian.org lenny/updates/main Packages [50.6kB] Fetched 5526kB in 4s (1330kB/s) Reading package lists... Done ...
Setting Up Web Server
Okay. The 64MB VPS is now up and running. What should we do next? Installing a web server of course, so we can start serving our static pages! Which web server? Definitely not Apache as it would be a waste of valuable memory here. Again my personal favourite is Nginx (pronounces Engine X), which currently powers LowEndBox.com. However, in this exercise I will go for Lighttpd because I found it easier to set up for abitary sites.
First of all — get Lighttpd installed.
endor:~# apt-get install lighttpd Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: ... Setting up libterm-readkey-perl (2.30-4) ... Setting up libterm-readline-perl-perl (1.0302-1) ... Setting up lighttpd (1.4.19-5) ... Starting web server: lighttpd. endor:~# ps -u www-data u USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND www-data 1690 0.0 1.5 5416 1008 ? S 07:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/lighttpd -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
Plain vanilla stripped down and un-configured 32 bit Lighttpd sits around 1MB RSS — not bad.
Next, we need to get our websites up there and point Lighttpd to them. It’s a good idea to put the web sites in an organised structure inside the file system. I usually just place them this way:
/var/www/<hostname>/html
So if I have an HTML file at http://www.example.com/testing.html, it will sit on the file system at /var/www/www.example.com/html/testing.html. Unfortunately I do not have 18 static sites. For testing purpose I am only going to display a very basic HTML page at http://test.lowendbox.com/.
endor:~# mkdir -p /var/www/test.lowendbox.com/html endor:~# echo '<h1>Low End Box Rocks!</h1>' > /var/www/test.lowendbox.com/html/index.html
So now our “website” is ready — how does Lighttpd, our webserver, knows where to find the files corresponding to the website? That’s where Lighttpd’s mod_simple_vhost comes in handy.
endor:~# lighttpd-enable-mod simple-vhost Available modules: auth cgi fastcgi proxy rrdtool simple-vhost ssi ssl status userdir Already enabled modules: Enabling simple-vhost: ok Run /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload to enable changes endor:~# /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload Stopping web server: lighttpd. Starting web server: lighttpd.
Now navigate to test.lowendbox.com (which already has an A record to my new VPS’s IP address) — here we have it! Low End Box Rocks!!!
Prerequisite:
You must be already familiar with DNS and know how to create records to point to IP addresses. For free DNS hosting I recommend EveryDNS, which has also been hosting LowEndBox’s domain.
You can now basically just dump static files at /var/www/<hostname>/html, with <hostname> resolved to your VPS’s IP address, and you will have your static websites over there in no time. You do not even need to tell Lighttpd to reload, as mod_simple_vhost automatically maps the hostname to appropriate file name. Repeat it 18 times and problem solved!
At 1 single testing site with no traffic, Lighttpd sits at around 1.5MB RSS, although I doubt it would increase significantly when you increase the number of sites or the traffic. Lighttpd and Nginx are single-threaded poll-based asynchronised web servers so for static file serving, the bottle-neck would be disk/network IO rather than amount of memory or CPU performance.
There are still lots of memory left. Maybe we can have some fun.
Installing WordPress
So you think, “hey Low End Box rocks and it runs on WordPress. So maybe I will have that installed as well!” Wow. But WordPress is a content management system for creating dynamic websites! It simply cannot be possible on a 64MB VPS, the WHT crowd says! Grrr!! Let’s give it a try.
To run WordPress from your static-file serving Lighttpd, you need a few more packages — namely MySQL and PHP in CGI/FastCGI mode.
endor:~# apt-get install mysql-server php5-cgi php5-mysql Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: ... Creating config file /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini with new version Setting up php5-mysql (5.2.6.dfsg.1-1+lenny2) ... Setting up sgml-base (1.26) ... Setting up xml-core (0.12) ... Setting up mailx (1:20071201-3) ...
I know it installs whole lot of other junks but don’t worry — we will live with them first and will try to optimise later. It also requires you to set up the root password for MySQL server, and I conveniently chose the most obscured password in this exercise — “root” (yes, don’t use that because I am already using it as my root password :)
We then need to configure lighttpd to handle PHP files.
endor:~# cat > /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi-php.conf
server.modules += ("mod_cgi")
cgi.assign = (".php" => "/usr/bin/php5-cgi")^D
endor:~# /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload
Stopping web server: lighttpd.
Starting web server: lighttpd.
Done! It should be able to serve PHP files. Just to test it out:
endor:~# echo '<?php phpinfo(); ?>' > /var/www/test.lowendbox.com/html/phpinfo.php
Now navigate to http://test.lowendbox.com/phpinfo.php — you should be able to see the output of phpinfo() function. What we are going to do next is to set up a WordPress blog under http://test.lowendbox.com/blog/. WordPress.org already provides a great tutorial on installing WordPress, but let’s do it step by step on the command prompt.
My plan:
- Create database “test_blog”
- Download the latest WordPress and unzip to test.lowendbox.com/blog
- Set up configuration file and run the WordPress install
- Update Lighttpd to provide clean URL, aka Pretty Permalinks.
Let’s go!
endor:~# mysqladmin -uroot -proot create test_blog endor:~# wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz Resolving wordpress.org... 72.233.56.138, 72.233.56.139 Connecting to wordpress.org|72.233.56.138|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: unspecified [application/x-gzip] Saving to: `latest.tar.gz' ... 2009-03-17 13:03:15 (1.01 MB/s) - `latest.tar.gz' saved [1624416] endor:~# tar zxf latest.tar.gz -C /var/www/test.lowendbox.com/html endor:~# cd /var/www/test.lowendbox.com/html endor:/var/www/test.lowendbox.com/html# mv wordpress blog endor:/var/www/test.lowendbox.com/html# mv blog/wp-config-sample.php blog/wp-config.php endor:/var/www/test.lowendbox.com/html# vi blog/wp-config.php
When you are editing WordPress’ configuration file, set DB_NAME to “test_blog”, DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD to “root” for something quick, dirty and potentially insecure. Here is one final step — navigate to http://test.lowendbox.com/blog/, and WordPress will guide you through the rest of setup.
It is also relatively easy to set up pretty permalinks for WordPress on Lighttpd. In our example,
endor:~# cat > /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/lowendbox.conf
$HTTP["host"] == "test.lowendbox.com" {
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/blog/" {
server.error-handler-404 = "/blog/index.php"
}
}^D
endor:~# /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload
Stopping web server: lighttpd.
Starting web server: lighttpd.
That’s it! You can now go into WordPress to configure the desirable Permalink Structure. Do note that the current WordPress dashboard page is very resource intensive, as it fetches development blog, other WP news, incoming links, etc from various sources, concurrently on separate PHP CGI processes. There might be plugins to turn off this server-killing behavior (or just use older version of WordPress like 2.0.x which is still maintained). Likewise some WP caching plugin can be very useful in reducing the load. Google them and you shall find.
Optimisation — Squeeze More Memory!
So now we have a Debian 5 web server box that can handle lots of static sites + a few WordPress blogs, and it fits “fine” on a 64MB Xen VPS. Let’s see what processes are running:
endor:~# ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
...
root 325 0.0 0.4 2032 292 ? S<s 04:25 0:00 udevd --daem
root 879 0.0 0.4 2788 304 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 /bin/bash --
root 1216 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Mar17 0:00 [pdflush]
root 1649 0.0 0.2 3144 188 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/famd
root 6427 0.0 4.4 8024 2928 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 sshd: root@pts/
root 6429 0.0 2.3 2804 1564 pts/0 Ss Mar17 0:00 -bash
root 6441 0.0 1.8 33092 1200 ? Sl Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/rsysl
root 6453 0.0 1.4 5284 976 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
root 6470 0.0 1.3 2048 896 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
daemon 6482 0.0 0.8 1772 560 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 /sbin/portmap
www-data 6510 0.0 2.6 5848 1736 ? S Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/light
root 6572 0.0 1.7 2488 1156 pts/0 S Mar17 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bi
mysql 6611 0.0 26.2 143652 17228 pts/0 Sl Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/mysql
root 6613 0.0 0.8 1636 536 pts/0 S Mar17 0:00 logger -p daemo
103 6973 0.0 1.3 6112 908 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4
root 6986 0.0 1.3 2308 908 pts/0 R+ 00:01 0:00 ps aux
endor:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 65704 51424 14280 0 936 22588
-/+ buffers/cache: 27900 37804
Swap: 131064 864 130200
Note that it’s an idle box. The swap is slightly used and at 37MB free it is actually not too bad. Let’s try to squeeze a little bit more memory out from the factory setup.
MySQL is by far the biggest offender, and I have talked about how to reduce MySQL memory usage here. If you are just running simple CMS, InnoDB is probably not required — it uses more memory and a lot heavier on IO as well. We can simply use the LxAdmin’s mysql.cnf which I linked on the other blog post to get the bare-minimum MySQL running.
endor:~# cat > /etc/mysql/conf.d/lowendbox.cnf [mysqld] key_buffer = 16K max_allowed_packet = 1M table_cache = 4 sort_buffer_size = 64K read_buffer_size = 256K read_rnd_buffer_size = 256K net_buffer_length = 2K thread_stack = 64K skip-bdb skip-innodb^D
As mysqld_safe script uses /bin/sh for scripting, it’s also a good idea to check whether dash is used instead of bash.
endor:~# apt-get install dash Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: ... Unpacking dash (from .../dash_0.5.4-12_i386.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Setting up dash (0.5.4-12) ... endor:~# dpkg-reconfigure dash Adding `diversion of /bin/sh to /bin/sh.distrib by dash' Adding `diversion of /usr/share/man/man1/sh.1.gz to /usr/share/man/man1/sh.distrib.1.gz by dash' endor:~# /etc/init.d/mysql restart Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld. Starting MySQL database server: mysqld. Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables..
One thing I don’t like about Debian 5 is its default inclusion of rsyslog. Well — it’s feature rich, but I don’t need MySQL and TCP syslog support. Weight at 1.2MB RSS is just a bit too fat I reckon. I am not game enough to go without a syslog daemon, so I just go for syslog-ng. Probably not the most light weight, but it’s just something I have been using for the last couple of years.
endor:~# ps -C rsyslogd v PID TTY STAT TIME MAJFL TRS DRS RSS %MEM COMMAND 6441 ? Sl 0:00 0 207 32936 1260 1.9 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd -c3 endor:~# apt-get install syslog-ng && dpkg --purge rsyslog Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: ... Setting up syslog-ng (2.0.9-4.1) ... Starting system logging: syslog-ng. (Reading database ... 16517 files and directories currently installed.) Removing rsyslog ... Purging configuration files for rsyslog ... endor:~# ps -C syslog-ng v PID TTY STAT TIME MAJFL TRS DRS RSS %MEM COMMAND 8215 ? Ss 0:00 0 105 2754 708 1.0 /usr/sbin/syslog-ng -p
Shedding 500kb RSS — not too bad I guess :)
Next — Portmap and FAM got installed when Lighttpd was first installed. Lighttpd does not really need FAM. It’s used for stat cache to reduce seeks, but can live without. Not that I have noticed any performance difference anyway for small traffic anyway. Having both of them removed from the process list would give us extra 750KB.
endor:~# apt-get remove --purge portmap eading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: ...
OpenSSH can be replaced by dropbear to save memory.
endor:~# touch /etc/ssh/sshd_not_to_be_run endor:~# apt-get install dropbear ... endor:~# vi /etc/default/dropbear endor:~# /etc/init.d/dropbear start Starting Dropbear SSH server: dropbear.
Just remember to set NO_START=0 in /etc/default/dropbear so dropbear can run as a daemon. Dropbear daemon is using around 500KB less than OpenSSH daemon during idle, and for each connection it uses 1.5MB less on this Debian 5 box — that’s quite a saving!
That’s probably it! Vixie cron can be replaced by a light weight DCRON but I can’t seem to be able find it in Debian’s repository. Exim4 is probably one of the most light weight mail daemon you can have, but then again you might want to question — “do I need a mail daemon running”? You can probably bring it down, and just run /usr/sbin/runq once every 2 hours to process the queue, in case the previous delivery failed. That would probably give you another 1MB to play with.
You can also use PDKSH to replace BASH as interactive shell to loose some weight.
endor:~# ps -C bash v PID TTY STAT TIME MAJFL TRS DRS RSS %MEM COMMAND 8409 pts/1 Ss 0:00 2 663 2140 1568 2.3 -bash endor:~# apt-get install pdksh endor:~# chsh -s /bin/pdksh <log out and then SSH back in> # ps -C pdksh v PID TTY STAT TIME MAJFL TRS DRS RSS %MEM COMMAND 8550 pts/0 Rs 0:00 0 174 1633 588 0.8 -pdksh
That’s 1 full megabyte off the scale! Also note that VPSLink’s /etc/inittab automatically spawn a BASH process on the console — just in case you got locked out from firewall. For me it’s the last line of inittab file. Change it to /bin/sh or /bin/pdksh, run init q to reload init(1), and then kill that bash process.
Here’s the end result:
# ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
...
root 325 0.0 0.4 2032 292 ? S<s Mar17 0:00 udevd --daem
root 1216 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Mar17 0:00 [pdflush]
root 6470 0.0 1.3 2048 896 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
103 6973 0.0 1.3 6112 912 ? Ss Mar17 0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4
root 7953 0.0 0.7 1716 524 ? S 00:23 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bi
mysql 7992 0.0 8.2 37904 5404 ? Sl 00:23 0:00 /usr/sbin/mysql
root 7994 0.0 0.8 1636 536 ? S 00:23 0:00 logger -p daemo
root 8215 0.0 1.1 2860 776 ? Ss 00:31 0:00 /usr/sbin/syslo
www-data 8313 0.0 2.4 5712 1640 ? S 00:37 0:00 /usr/sbin/light
root 8418 0.0 0.7 2052 468 ? Ss 00:51 0:00 /usr/sbin/dropb
root 8527 0.0 0.7 1712 468 ? Ss 01:19 0:00 /bin/sh --
root 8549 0.0 1.9 2712 1300 ? Ss 01:21 0:00 /usr/sbin/dropb
root 8550 0.0 0.9 1808 600 pts/0 Rs 01:21 0:00 -pdksh
root 8562 0.0 1.3 2308 908 pts/0 R+ 01:26 0:00 ps aux
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 65704 58852 6852 0 2180 40344
-/+ buffers/cache: 16328 49376
Swap: 131064 380 130684
That’s 12MB trimmed, which can be used in disk cache to improve static file serving.
Conclusion
So how do we conclude? 64MB is more than enough to serve a few low traffic static websites. You can actually run a few WordPress sites with a few hundred visitors a day — at the price equivalent to many heavily oversold shared hosting and you get root access!
One thing about root access though — in all my examples above I used root account and never bothered to use a normal user account. It is bad from security aspect so don’t do it. Or at least don’t tell anyone that you use nothing but root :)
Excellent work! If you need a DNS server, you can use maradns, that cost you only 2MB :)
And if you need ftp, I recomend pure-ftpd.
I always use root to do everything. Can you tell me why its wrong and what should I do in place?
@Marcos — for DNS, I just out source it unless I am running a DNS cluster. For FTP — Oh well it’s 21st century and FTP should have been left there for dead 15 years ago…
As of not always logging in as root, it’s so that you don’t accidentally do something stupid, like running “rm -rf ./” but then forgot to put in the dot…
[...] sites (on Debian Lenny), I decided to add a Link-1 Xen to my account and document the process. More here So how do we conclude? 64MB is more than enough to serve a few low traffic static websites. You can [...]
Hello, when i am trying to install mysql i get the error “Cannot allocate memory”.. Why?
@Thodoris — probably because you picked openvz VPS rather than xen VPS.
Also if the memory allocation error comes up when you start the MySQL, try to disable the InnoDB first.
I have picked up a openvz vps but maybe i will take the vpslink’s first plan..
What do you prefer? Xen or OpenVZ?
I mostly prefer Xen
Link to the forum post is no longer valid, as is most of the WHT offers linked to. Looks like WHT’s backups got hit pretty bad.
@Chuck — indeed. Hopefully WHT did not follow my post and try to run the whole vBullitin system on a 64MB VPS! LOL.
heh ya, though it’d be interesting to see how long it would take to load in that case. That actually brings up an idea for another experiment: How heavy of a forum can you run an a 64mb VPS? Might be worth looking into sometime
Great article!
I have just found your site while googling for its topic i.e. low end hosting. It’s great that there is a site dedicated to just this topic. I’m going to do some experimental work with network technologies and I would like to figure out how to make the most of low-end server I can get.
I heard that NetBSD is very effective i.e. runs great on low-end VPS’es. To check how much of this is true, I installed NetBSD 4.0.1 on my computer. Running “ps aux” doesn’t give me memory totals; here’s a screenshot of running top (obviously, no X):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22022497@N04/3387465817/sizes/m/
can you tell if this is low memory consumption? As far as I can see, not exactly.
The system has 2 GB of RAM, with no integrated video, tha should be 2048 MB of RAM. Top shows 1977M free, that means 71M is used – this isn’t exactly very low, is it? But on the other hand “9008K Act + 388K Wired + 3000K Exec + 3760K File + 1977M Free” doesn’t add up to 2048M. Can you please help me sort this out?
I’m not going to be maniacally obsessed with optimization, but it seems to me very worthwhile to know if there are significant gains to be had by running NetBSD instead of a Linux.
@Nickolai — sorry I came from the land of Penguins and am not familiar in the land of Daemons…
I’m not an expert, but that sounds alot like the RAM is being reserved for the OS. Whenever I used NetBSD I found that systems with very little RAM (eg, <256mb) would have under a couple megs of RAM used by the OS
I come from the land of Windows actually, so the workings of Linux and NetBSD are equally something to be learned for me. I was going to rent a low end Linux box for my experiments, but if NetBSD, as advertised, would have a much smaller memory footprint, I could just as well use it.
To my (poor) understanding, for now it seems that modern NetBSD system won’t have significantly lower memory footprint on low-end box. Maybe I should just use Debian per LowEndAdmin’s suggestion. That’s what many admins use on servers, after all.
NetBSD does in general have a lower footprint, but is also much harder to configure than Debian. Though when it’s configured properly, optimized a little, and left alone to perform its task it will barely ever have a problem related to resources.
If your new to the land of Linux/BSD’s then you should definitely be using either Ubuntu or Debian Etch on your systems. Their package system is ridiculously easy to use, not to mention full of plenty of software to keep you busy.
Hi, great guide. I’m curious, do you hard code the HTML/colour markup of your command line outputs in your post above? If not, do you use any specific WordPress plugin for this markup?
@Sunny — no WordPress plugin has been tortured to produce the command line output. All are “Hand Coded in Vim (TM)”
I’m not sure if this is right, but i think you missed a part:
When installing virtual hosting for lighttpd, dont you have to edit ‘/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf’, and change ‘server.document-root = “/var/www//html”‘
Great post!
@Mir — no you don’t. With the mod_simple_host it will have dynamic document root depending on the hostname passed in.
Oh ok. I have another question, what if i enter the ip address of the vps?, like “http:///lowendbox.com/
And if someone enters the ip address what domain does it go to?
Thanks, and sorry for all the questions.
@Mir — if you read the documentation on the mod_simple_host module on Lighttpd’s site, there’s a configuration for the “default host”, i.e.
simple-vhost.default-host = ‘example.com’
In this case, all hosts that cannot be mapped to a query (including IP based) will go under /var/www/example.com/html
Ok thanks for all of your help and (very) quick responses!!
Thanks for the article. It was a great inspiration to get off my rear and get off of shared hosting and get back into a VPS. I’m running very similar to what you’re using, with debian 5, lighttpd, dropbear, (no mysql… prefer sqlite) etc. with only about 13MB of ram used. Serving almost 1500 pages a day and not even breaking a sweat, on a VPSLink 64 meg box. It can be done!
diffra, what kind of site are you running and how much traffic does it use at 1500 pages a day ?
The website the he linked to (click on his name) appears to be hosted on VPSLink — so I guess it’s one of them?
LowEndAdmin is correct. It’s actually a collection of sites… maybe 15 total. most of the traffic is either dynamically generated images for forum signatures, or googlebot. For the record, I’m moving most of this over to slicehost after VPSLink’s latest outage. I’ve just had too many problems, even for a personal box. All my ‘production’ stuff runs on a 512MB apache slice, so i’m going to squeeze my Link1 into a slightly more roomy 256MB box.
Good Tutorial…thanks ;)
I followed this guide but I’m running at 50mb. :(
hi. thanks for this tutorial.
can u someday write about setting up website with wordpress/drupal but with nginx?
thanks
Hello lowendboxadmin. I am a newbie on building webservers and i am planning to host a website of our school, a K12 school from the philippines. I found your tutorial very nice, can this be enough to deploy a website for our school? or for the whole division probably? Any nice friendly advise if what i’ll be needing most?
Thanks.
VpsLink is indeed a good option. I monitor your site from few months and response time graph is pretty good:
http://site-uptime.net/su.cgi/en/report?publicKey=p3b7x8kynk9zedn1ejkhfdr9q95nv2pv
[...] This article shows techniques used to trim memory usage on OpenVZ system (with 128 MB RAM burstable). Mostly inspired by this article. [...]
“Or at least don’t tell anyone that you use nothing but root :)” I use root at the time!
Hi..How can I add
a website completely instead of a hostname
like in my registrar I can add *.mydomain.com to point to an ip.
please reply..
thanks in advance :)
Okay..I got it :D
in
/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
add
$HTTP["host"] =~ “(^|\.)YOURDOMAIN\.com$” {
server.document-root = “/var/www/YOURDOMAIN.com/html”
}
:D
[...] http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-sites-on-a-64mb-link-1-vps/ [...]
this setup is good..
but can you please provide an estimate of how much traffic it can handle ?
thanks
very nice..
but I found that Apache will be installed by default in many versions of debian ( I tried in Lenny )..so use this to remove it
[code]
apt-get remove apache2
[/code]
[...] http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-sites-on-a-64mb-link-1-vps/ [...]
excellent work! I think.
Excellent article.
We ended up purchasing a “LowEndBox Special” from Server Complete earlier today to try this out on (minus the OpenSSH & PDKSH replacements) and sure enough at the end of it lighttpd/PHP/MySQL/exim4/syslog-ng was using just 43 MB of RAM :)
As the VPS actually comes with 256 MB RAM anyway (270MB with Burst) we still have plenty of RAM left for use with other things – which is always useful.
Hi,
I think there is an error in your phpinfo screenshot. You create phpinfo.html but then call phpinfo.php.
You can force html files to be parsed for php code but I don’t think you do (or want to do) that?
I am I right in thinking this will only work for Xen machines, not OpenVZ?
@Andrew — thanks. Updated.
It should work on OpenVZ as well, although I found Xen is more predictable with memory usage.
Thanks. RAMHost are offering an 80MB RAM OpenVZ for $2.99 pm so I am interested in seeing if I can get WordPress to run – for my education rather than any traffic.
I’ve never used lighttpd and never heard of Nginx. Are they compatible with Apache e.g. .htaccess entries, rewrite code etc.?
how can i change all users shells to pdksh?
Never tried but this says it’s a simple edit to the /etc/passwd file.
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/redhat-fedora-linux-help/114190-change-shell-all-how.html
Please note that I am *NOT* in a position to test this as I’m time limited today and this coffee shop blocks SSH access.
Just to clarify a point which I seem to be missing. Why is using Xen a better solution in this case instead of using something like OpenVM? I understand that we’re talking about Swap memory for Xen instead of burstable member for the others. Just trying to understand why that’s important.
Thanks,
-drmike
Xen’s memory model is just much more predictable, so you do not need hacks such as this one. Google for “Xen vs. OpenVZ” for some articles.
Thanks for that. I gather that Veportal is in the same boat as OpenVZ when it comes to memory setup?
Just caught something on this. If you install WordPress on top of Lighttpd, you;re going to have a problem with the image multiple file uploader as it requires Lighttpd 1.5 and the Debian package is 1.4.x.
http://redmine.lighttpd.net/issues/1017
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-admin/includes/media.php#L1471
Nice tutorial! I followed it to make my own VPS using a cheap old 233Mhz server I had kicking around in my cupboard, and set it up following this way (some parts I had to customize).
I’m using Debian Sarge 3.1 on this server of mine, with thttpd (nginx and lighttpd were unavailable), dropbear, perl, dash and alsa (for a neat little macintosh-inspired startup tune). ntpdate is also being used as the computer doesn’t have a Real Time Clock.
Total ram usage on a fresh boot is about 12MB of RAM.
Thanks again for a wonderful tutorial!
I got a 128MB VPS.
Following this guide, the memory usage is 41Mb in total(well, almost no traffic at this stage). I am running lighttpd+php5-cgi+sqlite+xcache. For blogging, I am using Dokuwiki and Dotclear(which supports sqlite and wiki syntax).
I think lighttpd also need some specific optimization for better performance.
I have been playing with this sort of setup on my vps but I am using nginx over lighttpd as lighttpd has a memory leak in it atm, at my useage its not really noticable but for those on really small vps’s im sure it will be a problem quite fast :)
There’s a fairly easy walkthrough on installing Nginx here in case you want to go that route:
http://library.linode.com/web-servers/nginx/php-fastcgi-debian-5-lenny
Looks good for us so far.
for fun, I installed apache onto my vps. When loading a wiki (pmwiki ), cpu usage went through the roof and memory shot up. I had tweaked Apache for low memory use. Installed thttpd again, and all is well.
Apache is not memory efficent. Full stop.
[...] actually decided to put Debian on the VPS, and have a go at LowEndBox’s 64MB VPS Debian 5 Configuration Guide – and we now actually run SSH, syslog-ng, GeoIP aware BIND9 (custom configuration), MySQL, [...]
This is great tutorial i’ve seen.
What about want to have joomla instead of wordpress?
Any guide or tutorial for having great vps server for joomla environment?
Is there any specific requirements to have joomla website server?
The ideal how many joomla website to get best performance in vps?
Any advice wud be appreciate.
Thank you
Hi,
This is great tutorial i’ve seen.
How about wanna having vps for joomla website environment instead of wordpress? There is any special requirements or configuration like VPS for WordPress as above tutorial?
Will you writing about VPS for Joomla Environment? Any advice would be appreciate.
Thanks.
Thanks! I’m now running my wordpress site of 64MB with Debian 64bit over at Tiny VPS. Works a real treat :).
Thanks for this guide!
I have lighttpd, mysql, php5, awstats, and mybb running at around 43MB. =) I’m not on a 64MB server, but still!
Well…
I can’t have MYSQL working @ tinyVPS… Sam Parkinson – how did you manage?
Even with the my.cnf giver here, mysql doesn’t want to start and the logs are… totally empty!
I’m lost and don’t know what to do… Well, I’m on debian 32bits – heard that 32 was dealing better with low memory systems – maybe switching to debian 64 would do the trick?
But still – it’s strange, i really don’t see why I can’t have mysql working..
Do you know a light way to monitor all those sites in bandwidth usage with lighttpd?
I would use some CP with Apache, but no CP supports this webserver, and with that ram it’s just stupid using one:D
@Sandro – Have a look at vnStat, and it’s php frontend. It works a treat on lighttpd.
http://www.sqweek.com/sqweek/index.php?p=1
A great article – running a couple of WordPress blogs on a 128MB Xen VPS without hassle. However – I notice that despite using the same fastCGI config, I end up with 4 fastCGI processes rather than 2, one of which consumes about 40mb of my RAM… =S
what a nice trick!
good job :)
This guy Steve Hanov has an interesting site.. I think his whole site is hosted on a home dsl connection on his acer aspire one netbook. He also created his own blogging system with 1907 lines of PHP. you can check it out.
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=71
This one leads to his blogging system.
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=49
Hi can you please post an article like this in setting up a vps using nginx as web server. thanks
@earl — 512MB + a full Atom for yourself is too much for a low end box :)
@Ron — there plenty of Nginx articles on line. I am pretty much using Nginx exclusively these days. Maybe I’ll share my setup some day.
@admin I’ll be looking forward for that setup. Actually i’ve built my first website few weeks ago just to learn web development. It is written in Python/Django and is hosted on webfaction. Webfaction provides an out of the box setup to host a django site and other cms, however at 80MB shared 1 plan, price $9.50/month, i can be more productive if i host my site on a vps and learn the ropes of system administration.
Thanks again, worked perfectly with a test site !
I am also interested in Nginx server and I found the article on how to setup Nginx webserver.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/rhel-fedora-install-configure-nginx-php5/
I did follow up and try to setup on my Centos 64 bits 256mb vps. It is up and running.
Wordpress 3.0 is out ! I’m excited !
This is a nice article about low memory/low disk space VPS servers. The one thing that is not mentioned here is CPU. There are VPS providers out there that limit CPU down to a few hundred Mhz as well as low mem/low disk. How much processing power would you need to serve up 18 static sites reasonably well? For that matter, how much processing power would you need to serve up the WP blogs reasonably well?
@Raj — define “reasonably well”.
For static sites, for event based web servers it’s mostly limited by IO. For a WordPress blog, this very site runs on a Xen VPS with 80MB of memory. Fast enough for me.
Most sites, on today’s high speed home internet connections, can load within a few seconds (2 or 3 seconds from the time your browsner initiates the request until the time the page is fully rendered). Would you agree?
So I would think “reasonably well”, for an 18 static site server, would be to have the sites load within that timeframe even when the server is processing a few concurrent requests for the static content.
Gotta admit this this is one of the few sites I’ve never had a problem with slow loads or not loading at all.
@Raj — you’ll find that with static site, the speed is usually determined by
And usually has not much to do with the CPU.
When I run the command to configure PHP and lighttpd
cat > /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi-php.conf
server.modules += (“mod_cgi”)
cgi.assign = (“.php” => “/usr/bin/php5-cgi”)^D
My SSH session just hangs.
@Jackk just run “lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi” and then restart lighttpd.
@IWTFI – Thanks – that worked! xD
yes that’s working and is easier. can’t understand why LowEndAdmin did not choose this method.
Perhaps there should be a mention of the command you posted in case this doesn’t work for others?
the commands in the post does nothing.
actually he means to open /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi-php.conf and write:
server.modules += (“mod_cgi”)
cgi.assign = (“.php” => “/usr/bin/php5-cgi”)
but why not just enable fastcgi? more memory usage?
Which method uses more RAM?
lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi
but if you just want cgi open /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi-php.conf write:
server.modules += (“mod_cgi”)
cgi.assign = (“.php” => “/usr/bin/php5-cgi”)
then disable fastcgi “lighttpd-disable-mod fastcgi” and restart lighttpd
but well….. fastcgi is faster xd
@Above
Is there much difference between how much RAM each method uses?
Jack.
yes. fastcgi uses way more RAM.
Thanks your help. I think I will stick with just CGI.
Jack.
yes that’s what i suggest actually ;)
Thanks for all your help!
Jack xD
Sorry to be a pain – Why does this happen?
vps:~# /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload
Stopping web server: lighttpd.
Starting web server: lighttpd2010-07-24 21:12:45: (configfile.c.796) source: /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-cgi-php.conf line: 2 pos: 41 invalid character in variable name
2010-07-24 21:12:45: (configfile.c.852) configfile parser failed at: )
2010-07-24 21:12:45: (configfile.c.855) source: /usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl line: 2 pos: 8 parser failed somehow near here: (EOL)
2010-07-24 21:12:45: (configfile.c.855) source: /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf line: 158 pos: 1 parser failed somehow near here: (EOL)
failed!
vps:~#
i’m not sure but i think you enabled both fastcgi and cgi together :/
try “lighttpd-disable-mod fastcgi”.
vps:~# lighttpd-disable-mod fastcgi
Available modules: auth cgi fastcgi proxy rrdtool simple-vhost ssi ssl status userdir
Already enabled modules: cgi-php simple-vhost
Already disabled fastcgi
Run /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload to enable changes
vps:~#
Looks as if it’s already disabled.
i’m sorry i can’t help. what about rebuild your vps and setup all again in a clear installation?
OK I’ll try a rebuild and get back to you.
Thanks,
Jack.
I try the tutorial on my VPS with Debian 5,
But I got a problem when I try to make the database :
# mysqladmin -uroot -proot create test_blog
mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed
error: ‘Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)’
Would anyone help me with this issue?
:(
Erawan: Where it says “-proot” use your mysql root password after the “-p” (instead of root).
If you haven’t set a mysql root password yet, try this to set it:
mysqladmin -u root password ‘yourpassword’
(replace ‘yourpassword’)
@Erawan Arif Nugroho – Did you follow the tut to lower your MySQL RAM usage?
Jack.
@Mr. David : Thank you for the explanation, I will try it again now. :)
@Mr. Jack : Not yet sir, I just learn this tutorial, not yet with another tutorial. Maybe after finished with this, I will try it.
Thanks for this insightful post, but don’t you run BIND on your 64MB servers ?
I am done setting up the VPS as the tutorial.
Its running on 34Mb with the Santrex OpenVZ VPS.
My last problem is, setting it wether using www or without www, it still the same content. And also when the visitor goes to the VPS IP, it shows the same content.
lcant believe u doit :( I m tring to run my 50K hit site on a 24gb ram with 8 quad cores…