Is 512MB RAM too less for installing XFES (e.g. elasticsearch)

[eva2000]

At some stage I'm thinking of renting dedicated servers and moving off Linode, but that isn't going to be required for performance reasons for a while yet. Cost-wise it is getting close, and mostly comes down to finding a good dedicated machine provider who is offering good pricing which requires me putting in time on it

That's what i said for my forum's linode usage $40/m VPS but once you factor in disk raid redundancy on a dedicated server, costs are much higher compared to linode heh.

example automated linode vps migration when hardware raid fails https://community.centminmod.com/threads/linode-block-storage-early-access.11985/#post-52898

 

[abdfahim]

From the comments here, I guess Nginx is lighter than Apache, am I right? All my experience is based on Apache+MySql, should I start going towards Nginx direction? Does it worth spending time in understanding a new web server?

 

[Xon]

apache+mod_php tends to be very memory heavy. You want to limit the number of php instances serving pages, because you only have so much CPU or memory. But apache+mod_php forces every potential connection to be able to load a php instance, which really slams memory usage.

The failure mode of apache+mod_php tends to be death-spirals where your website spontaneously goes really slow and grinds to a halt vs throwing usable error messages quickly.

 

[abdfahim]

Hmm, good to know. In my VPS, I don't find any mod_php or mod_php5. I guess the PHP parsing is being done through CGI (mod_fcgid). Is that any good, or Nginx is still better?

Sorry for a bunch of noob questions. I did read several documents in digitalocean and other sources to know the difference between Nginx and Apache, and it seems it's established that Nginx is much faster, especially with static content.

So, I just want to have an opinion from the community here from XF context, because all I'll do is run a couple of XF community.

 

[rainmotorsports]

The only real downside on the newbie end of NGINX is the lack of htaccess compatibility. You have to write that sort of stuff into your config.

I use php-fpm. You install nginx, you install php, you install php-fpm. You have to create a php fpm pool and then configure that socket in the nginx config for that particular host. There is more to do but pretty much at that point it works.

 

[Xon]

@abdfahim since you are using centos7, the package name is sadly just called "php".

Note; using a 3rd party repo and php7.1 offers very significant performance improvement over the stock php 5.4 in centos 7. For XF, you can easily get a real 45% lower CPU requirements going from php 5.4 -> php 7.1 for XF, with using less than half the memory usage too boot.

I'ld recommend @eva2000's https://centminmod.com/ for this since using upstream php, nginx(or apache) mysql/mariadb offers significant advantages over stock configuration and the centminmod is a good introduction to managing that.

 

[TPerry]

I'ld recommend @eva2000's https://centminmod.com/ for this since using upstream php, nginx(or apache) mysql/mariadb offers significant advantages over stock configuration and the centminmod is a good introduction to managing that.

Agreed... had I just got another VPS to server my personal blog on (was on NameCheap shared hosting - long story why it's not now). First thing after installing CentOS 7 (and getting updates) was to install CentMin. Yes, I could do it all myself, but why re-invent the wheel when @eva2000 has such an excellent script out.

 

[abdfahim]

Thanks a lot everyone, last night I removed apache from my trial VPS and installed Nginx, but was a bit uncertain about the settings. I will check the centmin website tonight.