n8n and Mautic not starting after server reboot - Contabo VPS extremely slow

[Nexus-AI-solutions]

Hi all,

Since this morning my Contabo VPS (12 cores, 48GB RAM, 800GB NVMe) was very slow. I rebooted Contabo and now both n8n and Mautic won't start properly. The Contabo dashboard itself is also extremely slow.

Server specs: Contabo VPS 4 NVMe — 12 cores, 48GB RAM, 800GB NVMe
Resources are fine: 44GB RAM free, 663GB disk free

What happened after reboot:

Docker took ~5 minutes to start (stuck in "activating")
PostgreSQL took ~7 minutes for crash recovery (fsync of data directory), it wasn't shut down cleanly
n8n startup script got stuck on chown -R /app/data (2.3GB) for ~10 minutes due to slow disk
Once the chown finished, n8n enters a restart loop
Mautic also fails to start
n8n logs show:

Task runner connection attempt failed with status code 403 (repeated)
Task request timed out after 60 seconds
Database connection timed out / Database connection recovered (alternating)
Eventually receives SIGTERM and restarts
n8n never listens on port 5678
What I've verified:

PostgreSQL is up and accepting connections (pg_isready OK)
Can query the DB from inside the n8n container with psql — works fine
Port 5432 reachable, Redis running
All containers show as running in docker ps
n8n container: 0 restarts, using only 28MB RAM
n8n package: Updated Feb 9 (image 202602090744050000). Was working fine before the reboot.

Anyone know what I could do now?

Thanks!

[james]

Hello @nexus-ai-solutions

@Nexus-AI-solutions said in n8n and Mautic not starting after server reboot - Contabo VPS extremely slow:

n8n startup script got stuck on chown -R /app/data (2.3GB) for ~10 minutes due to slow disk

It might be your provider is having issues with the storage.
Saw something similar once on netcup where the underlying RAID for the vServers was failing and thus all vServers that uses that RAID hat extremely poor disk performances.
If the disk I/O is slow and the iowaits increase, the whole system load rises and slows down everything.
I advise checking your system disk speeds and iowaits. If they look very bad for an NVMe drive, contact your hosting provider about this issue.

[humptydumpty]

You’ll find way too many horror stories if you search for Contabo on this forum. I had the nvme plan and the speeds were constantly under 500mb/s. Support was useless. Frequent network issues were common. I’ve since moved to Hetzners dedicated vcpu entry plan that costs less than half but performance is top notch. It’s hosting my public facing sites while the rest are self hosted on premise. Before you go nuts trying to fix things on Contabo, go through a migration to a new provider and see how it goes. Use dry run feature when setting up the dns so the live sites are still using Contabo for now.