rlucas.net: The Next Generation

I’ve been using an “el cheapo,” $15 / month, 64M RAM Debian GNU/Linux VPS from Spry for a couple weeks now. Some things to note:

• You get X amount of RAM with “burstable” extra ram, but you’re not going to get any from the burst. Everyone else is using it.
• There is NO SWAP as far as I can tell. When you hit 63.9M of RAM, processes start segfaulting and blowing up.
• free and top will lie to you. ps -aux seems to tell the truth.
• You really need to check /proc/user_beancounters as root to get the real number of (4k) pages of memory used, and the number of faults, if you’re curious.

Too early for a verdict. But don’t count on being able to run the same stuff on a 64M Spry VPS as you would on a 64M box with a half-gig of swap (grinding its way through but eventually getting the job done).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under tech_and_market_reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.