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Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

(disco.cloud)
804 points jryio | 1 comments | 21 Oct 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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speedgoose ◴[21 Oct 25 21:12 UTC] No.45661785[source]▶
Looking at the htop screenshot, I notice the lack of swap. You may want to enable earlyoom, so your whole server doesn't go down when a service goes bananas. The Linux Kernel OOM killer is often a bit too late to trigger.

You can also enable zram to compress ram, so you can over-provision like the pros'. A lot of long-running software leaks memory that compresses pretty well.

Here is how I do it on my Hetzner bare-metal servers using Ansible: https://gist.github.com/fungiboletus/794a265cc186e79cd5eb2fe... It also works on VMs.

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1. bouncycastle ◴[22 Oct 25 08:47 UTC] No.45666389[source]▶
sometimes swap seems to accumulate even though there is plenty of ram. It is too "greedy" by default, probably set for desktops not servers in mind.

Therefore it is better to always tune "vm.swappiness" to 1 in /etc/sysctl.conf

You can also configure your web server / TCP stack buffers / file limits so they never allocate memory over the physical ram available. (eg. in nginx you can setup worker/connection limits and buffer sizes.)