Hi,
Do you have suggestions for kernel tweaks for getting the most out of a RAM limited system?
I am running a service requiring 2GB of RAM (netbird) on a VPS which has just 1 GB of memory. I am doing so because I am a stingy bastard and I use only free VPSs for my personal use so I get what I am paying for.
Because of this hardware limit in about 12 hours from service start I begin swapping a bit too much. This would still be manageable but soon the hypervisor gets really pissed and steals up to 90% of the CPU. So the only solution so far is restarting the docker containers every 12 hours (not great, not terrible).
Looking to improve this, Iam now experimenting with ZRAM and swappiness and it seems some benefit can be achieved by using some of the Linux kernel feaures. Is there anything else I should look into?
On AWS they have something called “bursting”. Basically they will let you use 100% of your vCPU, but not all the time. If you use it constantly they start to throttle you. That’s explicitly stated when you rent an EC2 instance (which is their VPS). Perhaps your provider is doing something similar.
Yes exactly, burstable instances it’s common jargon for AWS and GCP, but applies to all major providers.
Yeah, those are great for something that will be sitting idle most of the time, awful for anything else.