Hello,

I have a Coldfusion VPS+ package with about 40 small/medium sized websites on it.

My VPS also has the MySQL, SmarterMail and SmarterStats installed on it.

I'm not planning on adding any additional websites to my VPS, but I have found that most of the server resources are now taken up and I am getting occasional issues with email and Coldfusion tripping out. I find that every couple of days I need to restart the server to get things running smoothly again.

I am not an expert when it comes to server management, but I was wondering if there are any tweaks I can make to the server to get things running a bit more smoothly?

Thank you in advance for your suggestions.

Simon

We used to have a VPS before colocating our server. But when we did have a VPS, a few steps that stabilized it are the following:

Disable all unnecessary services - We found there were alot of services running that shouldn't be such as the Print Spooler, and Windows Image Acquisition. - Not sure why HMS would even have these enabled to start with. Use your judgment on what to disable. There are alot of website resources relating to this.

We had our VPS set to automatically restart every 3 days at like 2am. We found a big improvement in stabilization after this.

Since you're on the VPS+ package, which is what we were on, make sure your websites, sql databases, mysql databases, SmarterMail domains are all on the d drive, and make sure all logs files such as IIS logs, sql server logs, and smaterstats and smartermail logs are on the E drive.

I think trying these little things will give you an improvement, but try at your own risk. They worked for us, but may have a different result for you.

Jason,

I've already implemented a lot of the steps you suggest, but a scheduled restart of the VPS sounds like it might be worth a try. Please could you let me know how to set this up?

Many thanks,

Simon

Create a scheduled task to run the following command:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe -r -f -t 01

We had our schedule at

Weekly Every 1 week at 2am on Monday, Thursday, Saturday


Make sure you set a "Run As" user so the task can run when no one is logged on.

Hope this helps

Jason,

Thanks. I will give it a try.

Simon

Also don't forget to run defrag! I noticed that when my VPS got really fragmented performance went to ****. I feel your pain. I wish HMS would have the VPS units setup with bare bones services ( just enough to boot ), then let us enable what we need. Your setup sounds similar to mind except I am using .NET and not CF. The biggest issue I have found is trying to uninstall SQL server. As it always seems to leave garbage behind. Also if you are using .NET at all ( for smartermail / smarterstats ) I would recommend setting your App Pools to recycle every few hours if memory is getting tight.

I wouldn't recommend uninstalling SQL on a VPS...just disable it via services.msc