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

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.

Yeah, no way. As soon as you hit swap, _most_ apps are going to have a bad, bad time. This is well known, so much so that all EC2 instances in AWS disable it by default. Sure, they want to sell you more RAM, but it's also just true that swap doesn't work for today's expectations.

Maybe back in the 90s, it was okay to wait 2-3 seconds for a button click, but today we just assume the thing is dead and reboot.

Yeahna, thats just memory exhaustion.

Swap helps you use ram more efficiently, as you put the hot stuff in swap and let the rest fester on disk.

Sure if you overwhelm it, then you're gonna have a bad day, but thats the same without swap.

Seriously, swap is good, don't believe the noise.

I don’t understand. If you provision the system with enough RAM, then you can for every page in RAM, hot or not.

Only if you have more RAM than disk space, which is wasteful for many applications.

Running out of memory kills performance. It is better to kill the VM and restart it so that any active VM remains low latency.

That is my interpretation of what people are saying upthread, at least. To which posters such as yourself are saying “you still need swap.” Why?

RAM costs money, disk space costs less money.

It's a bit wasteful to provision your computers so that all the cold data lives in expensive RAM.

>It's a bit wasteful to provision your computers so that all the cold data lives in expensive RAM.

But that's a job applications are already doing. They put data that's being actively worked on in RAM they leave all the rest in storage. Why would you need swap once you can already fit the entire working set in RAM?

Sure, some applications are written to manually do a job that your kernel can already do for you.

In that case, and if you are only running these applications, the need for swap is much less.

You mean to tell me most applications you've ever used read the entire file system, loading every file into memory, and rely on the OS to move the unused stuff to swap?

No? What makes you think so?

Then what do you mean, some applications organize hot and cold data in RAM and storage respectively? Just about every application does it.

A silly but realistic example: lots of applications leak a bit of memory here and there.

Almost by definition, that leaked memory is never accessed again, so it's very cold. But the applications don't put this on disk by themselves. (If the app's developers knew about which specific bit is leaking, they'd rather fix the leak then write it to disk.)