For several months, my VPS has been guzzling RAM (you didn’t think this post was actually about sheep did you?!). It became one of those annoying problems where my reaction was, ‘I’ll throw more money at it for now, and look into it further when I have more time’.

(By which I mean, tell someone who knows more about these things to look at it when they have time. Obviously).

Several months down the line, I was paying more than is humanly necessary for a VPS. I was kind of at the point where a dedicated server would be more cost-effective, but being an SEO geek, I shy away from that kind of ‘LET’S HAVE ALL MY SITES IN ONE PLACE UNDER ONE IP’ thing; I currently have three or four shared hosting accounts with different companies across the world (and yes, I’m including VPS as shared hosting, not just because it is, but also because my databases are literally still on a shared server at Dreamhost due to their kooky set up).

Anyway, my VPS was spiking at around 2GB/day, and I was getting endless YOU NEED MOAR RESOURCES FOR YOUR VPS emails from Dreamhost along the lines of, ‘Nobody likes to hear they’ve put on a few pounds…’. Yeah, thanks for that Dreamhost. I’m already having traumatic VPS-related issues, why not make me feel bad about my weight whilst you’re at it.

Just kidding.

Mostly.

So I made Joe look at the VPS, and we moved some sites off it to see what happened. Nothing, really. Then I asked one of my old work friends to take a look at it. He freaked out when he saw it was Debian, and then quickly changed the subject to an SEO issue he was having #storyofmylife. (Yes, I just used a hashtag completely inappropriately. This is how bad the situation was getting).

So we did some more research, I found about some random settings that would ‘help’ from looking at the Dreamhost wiki and forums, and the RAM started to look more like this:

I was all, ‘Yaaaay!’

Until this happened:

Gah.

By this point, I was just like, ‘Let’s just raise a fucking ticket’. It IS a managed VPS after all.

Cue hours and hours of me going, ‘Have they replied yet?’ and Joe going ‘No. No. Still no. No,’ followed by me hmpfing along the lines of, ‘Well, they’d never get away with that at my work. All hell would have broken loose about nine and a half hours ago.’

When we eventually got a reply, we found out it’s apparently a ‘common problem’ that happens to be caused by the All In One SEO Pack plugin. Which just so happens to be my all-time favourite second WordPress plugin (after Link Juice Keeper). Surprisingly, I managed to get over that pretty quickly and said ‘Let’s switch to Yoast’. I surprised myself with how calm, rational and practical I was. There was a point when I would have had a massive temper tantrum and claimed that the world was out to get me (don’t get me wrong, I do still fundamentally believe that, but generally for better reasons).

So we switched the ‘most important’ site to Yoast, and straight away everything calmed down a lot. Blossom is still incredibly slow, but that’s because I haven’t got around to switching the plugins yet. I hope.

In summary…

Things I could have done better

I could have contacted Dreamhost a lot sooner and got it sorted faster, but it was good to investigate a bit and have a few different pairs of eyes on it.

Things I didn’t do

Go on Twitter and rant passively-aggressively about how Dreamhost is shit and I hope they all DIAF. Because I really, REALLY hate it when people do that. Especially when it’s their own fault. Please people, have some respect for the poor social media minions, and don’t ruin their day by suggesting they do unspeakable things to their close family members.

Things I learned

I know shockingly little about virtual servers. Also, people who work in support for other hosting companies know shockingly little about other people’s virtual servers. Especially when it comes to Debian.