[jon-)]

Thanks for the reply. It does sound a very clever approach, and the only thing that I can think of that might be a problem is if actual memory usage on the server is higher than I expected at the time the script was run. The script would have to check if there was a enough free memory before running that process.

e.g. if max memory was set at 2 GB and was temporarily 1400 MB. If it then tried to run a 1000 MB process, the server might be forced into a reboot by DreamHost's process killer because it would exceed the memory on the server. The script should only run if there is enough free memory to run the process (sounds obvious, but if it's automated, there's potential for a problem).

EDIT: Maybe something it could do in future is detect the amount of cached memory being used on the server and allow you to use a configurable percentage of that for the process. Then, when the script is run it should never cause an OOM issue on the server and will always reduce the cache by that percentage (the percentage could be set higher or lower depending on how aggressive you want the script to be).

[ottodv]

Yes, those are the kind of checks that would happen once I've integrated it into PsManager - it would basically work out how much the cache must be reduced by in order for a resize to happen without a reboot.

Like I said, this was a program I wrote to test this concept for cache reduction. In the state the program is in now you'll have to check yourself how big the cache is before running it. You can run it with other values than 1000, it's up to you exactly how much. If your server is constantly using below 600 MB and you have 2000 MB it makes sense to reduce it a bit. If it sometimes uses 1400 MB then maybe it does not make sense to reduce it in the first place.

[jon-)]

No worries, I think what you've come up with is very useful, and it was just meant as feedback in case you ever decided to do something more with it.

This whole issue is just making me think it's ridiculous to always have this money/memory battle. The cost I am paying right now for VPS is more than a dedicated server would be with quadruple the amount of RAM (I'm using 2GB a month on a web PS, plus 800 MB on a MySQL PS), so it's probably time I switched to dedicated hosting...