Cloudron and Swap File Use

[nebulon]

I think we would have to separate some issues here. Cloudron's main service (box process) is not setting up anything special regarding swap, so since you say you get response issues on the Cloudron API itself and system RAM is not the issue here from your perspective, I guess something else is at play causing this. So maybe before going into apps, first try to figure out what is happening on those API calls.

For a start check the /home/yellowtent/platformdata/logs/box.log during the time when the API calls fail. This should show some error to work with.

If this is some virtual server, it could also mean that CPU or disk becomes very slow if you share the same hardware resources with other virtual servers. Such usage is usually not visible in your system stats but can have a real impact.

Also keep vmstat 1 via SSH running for some time and look at the si (swap in) and so (swap out) numbers, to get a sense of how the system is loading and offloading memory pages live.

[crazybrad]

@nebulon Great point about the VPS. I am going to try "monitoring" two different Cloudrons at different VPS providers. Let's see if there is a similar pattern (perhaps something related to Clourdon) or if one Cloudron is having API issues, then that would suggest a VPS provider issue. In any case and on all Cloudrons, I will check the box.log to see if there is something happening on the Cloudron when API issues appear.

Independent of the API/heartbeat issues, what is your recommendation on managing the swap file and it's size?

[nebulon]

The rough rule here would be, that if the server has limited RAM, then use a larger swap file. If you have plenty of RAM a smaller say 4GB swap for edge cases to increase stability is good.

What limited RAM means kinda depends on how much apps and which apps you have installed. So this is really hard to say.

Overall unless you are sure the swapping is the actual bottleneck, I would not dive too much into that and first check other things.

[crazybrad]

@nebulon Let me use "vmstat 1" as you suggested and see what is really going on.

[robi]

@Jamie_Casper can you give us an example that's more specific?

[jdaviescoates]

@robi I'm pretty sure @jamie_casper is an AI spam bot - as @girish just spotted, all of their posts are innocent enough looking summaries of posts which don't really add anything. IMHO clearly fishing for upvotes so they can come back and post spam links.

[robi]

@jdaviescoates All good, clearly it can't be more specific ;-]

Banhammer time

[joseph]

@robi @jdaviescoates i deleted the user

[sponch]

mh...my server has 32GB of RAM and 4GB Swap.
While only 16 GB of RAM are used the swap file is almost at 4GB. Is this expected behavior? DOn't have any problems with performance btw.

[crazybrad]

@sponch I noticed the same on my Cloudron, but I would let the experts weigh in on your question.

[james]

Hello @sponch
It depends on your provider how he initializes the Ubuntu system.
A good guide is https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_storage_devices/getting-started-with-swap_managing-storage-devices#recommended-system-swap-space_getting-started-with-swap
According to the Red Hat guide, 4GB SWAP for a 32GB RAM system is the minimal recommended.