devrandom
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join:2003-06-28
| reply to gabeman
Re: VPS you can recommend?
said by gabeman  :» leeware.comI would recommend going for a host that uses Xen over one that uses Virtuozzo. Virtuozzo doesn't seem to let user access swap, so if you run out of memory, your applications will crash. This makes compiling stuff near impossible. Yeah, Virtuozzo manages the swap for the VPS (as I last understood it) as a method of ensuring service quality for the entire server (if everybody made huge swap files and started going at it on a hardware node, it'd be bad).
You have to be careful when selecting Virtuozzo plans from VPS providers though. There are two types of accounting for which your VPS' limits come from:
UBC is short for User Beancounters, which was the old way to do Virtuozzo VPS accounting. When you buy a plan from a provider under this method of accounting, you get soft/hard limits on mundane things like TCP sockets, the number of file descriptors you can have open, etc. The variables from providers who use UBC are typically not the same (tweaking them properly requires someone who really knows what they're doing).
You're generally able to hit the wall (or so to speak) faster under UBC. As earlier though, it totally depends on the host, and if they know what they're doing. You can always ask for a copy of /proc/user_beancounters under the plan that you want to see how they set things up, and compare in between hosts.
The newer accounting method, called SLM actually creates some standardization across hosts. You're basically given an amount of SLM ram, and this works more like a real dedicated server. If you start to run out of SLM memory, Virtuozzo will try to delay execution of whatever you're doing, or nail a thread of the process you're trying to execute (and its fairly "smart" at doing the nailing so you won't end up with something like sshd gone).
Xen is actually not immune from these problems since you can hit the kernel OOM killer (Linux--what most people are using for Xen hosting).
You can work around it by creating a swap file on your particular disk partition, and turning it on (although this does in effect create disk i/o problems for your neighbors if you start railing your swapfile/disk i/o).
Aside from the technicalities, I would choose a host that makes you happy. If you get a nice plush host that takes good care of you (and makes the proper recommendations as needed for upgrading/downgrading), you should be able to ignore all the little technical details. There are no such things as perfect hosts though, so pick to your needs. |
