How to shut down/restart your VPS without locking it up

Stephen

Stephen

US Operations
Staff member
I am writing this, because if you restart your VPS with RAM allocation at 100% usage, the VPS will lock up for 20+ hours and not be usable. So this is both a warning, and a how-to.

First when you have a lockup on your VPS, go to the VZ Power Panel, you got this URL in your Welcome email that I sent. I can not post it here, as it is different for each user.

Follow this process:
1. Login to Power Panel, use your WINDOWS login information.
2. Check the Resources bar at the top as you login, but check RAM usage directly using QOS option on the left side, from here it will give, CPU, RAM, and HD usage bars, if your ram is over 85% please use the Services or Processes managment tools to close some programs and get the ram usage under 80%.
3. Either restart from within VPS on remote desktop(Start, Shutdown, Restart), or use the same VZ Power Panel and go to Power control, and stop, then start the VPS.

Thank you for your attention when rebooting, this will help prevent lockups on your VPS account.
 
Thank you, Stephen for this information. I followed your directions and was able to view everything. I noticed that my VPS RAM was running close to 90% most of the time [I have Plesk installed], so I turned off all services that I do not need at this time. Since I am using the external MS SQL, I stopped all of those services. Also stopped Apache TomCat and ASP.net as I do not need them. That brought the RAM down to around 68%. With it sometimes going up to 75%. Checked out my site and all is running great and a noticeable speed increase. This information was very helpful and being new to Windows/VPS, I need all of the information possible.

Thanks,
silvercoyote22
 
Thanks for the info :) Today, I ran across "ran out of memory" errors even though I now have over 1gig free of hard drive. So I figured it was RAM. Fortunately, my RAM is at 82.16% but everything still gives an out of memory error, setups, programs, etc.

I rebooted the vps to see if there was a memory leak somewhere. Anyway, the ram went down to 66% then shot up to 73%. I found out that the sql server 2005 setup will not complete because there isnt enough ram in the budget VPS plan for it to complete. It shot up to 99.88% during installed, then the install bails out because the ram disappeared.

In short, I learned that you cannot install any database server software on this plan :) Im also thinking its safer to wait until the SQL 2005 your setting up be available and just use that :)
 
we have a few users using SQL 2005 even on the value plan, but they have other services disabled. SQL uses a large portion of RAM.
 
Another thing you will want to do if you are running sql server is give it a fixed amount of ram. Out of the box, sql server grabs ram and uses it as it sees fit. It's supposed to leave enough for the OS and other processes, but generally doesn't do a great job of this. Allocate it a fixed amount of ram and leave it at that.

Note, you will want to make sure the database has enough ram. Use server monitor and the other built in tools to make sure things are fine.
 
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