

Digital Ocean Secretly Wants You to Switch to Larger Droplets? - pungoyal
http://sinisterlight.com/blog/2014/01/31/digital-ocean-secretly-wants-you-to-switch-to-larger-droplets/

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Ellipsis753
I've got no issues with this. Of course they want people to upgrade
themselves. They do provide a very nice guide to using swap which I followed
myself.

They want to look the best they can and as fast as they can. If your server is
heavily using swap people will think it's slow. Also SSDs do not like being
written to again and again. This is exactly what using it for swap does so
this could be another little reason against it being on by default.

To be fair, I've got a small Wordpress website with Apache, MySQL and PHP on a
$5 droplet. After several weeks of working fine MySQL ran out of memory and
stopped. Adding swap space has fixed this and the server can still handle 100
connections at once OK. This isn't amazing but it's enough for me for now. So
I'd say, add a little swap but be sure you don't have to use it often. I'm
totally happy with it being off by default. More RAM will give much better
performance than more swap and $5 is incredibly cheap.

~~~
dhimes
I'm a new DO customer as well and I have no problem with this either. The $5
is for devs and designers- $10-$15 gets me something the public can use.

No contracts.

I have a couple of laptops in the office I use for devs as well- but it's on a
dsl with a dynamic ip. To make it static is $30/mo (last I checked). To
upgrade from dsl-- I have to switch providers, get a bigger bundle, etc.

This is waaaay better. I can still use the office machines- and do- but have
something easier for most worker to use on a daily basis.

(The office ip is tracked with ddclient and I use dnsdynamic.org to follow it.
I also email it to myself 4 times a day because dnsdynamic is free, and a
little spotty. By the time I start paying for real ip stuff, I might as well
go with DO.)

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kbar13
....what?

You should not consider swap space as additional memory. The performance of
swap, even on SSD, cannot compare to RAM.

> Secretly wants you to switch to larger droplets

They operate a business where they get more money if you switch to a larger
plan. What, do you think they want EVERYONE to stay on the $5/month plan?

Running out of memory is an issue of not being able to tune your stack
correctly, and not being able to scale your application correctly. This is not
the fault of Linux, mysql, or your hosting provider. It is your inability to
plan ahead and prepare.

~~~
illumen
Except every other provider enables swap by default.

I understand another reason why they don't do it though... SSD has a very low
amount of writes available, and if low mem machines are swapping all the time,
then the SSD will wear out much more quickly.

Another annoying thing is that they disabled resizing the SSD space used. So
now, when people upgrade from say 20GB to 30GB there is no easy way to do it.
They did used to do this, but they disabled the easy interface for it. So lots
of people upgrading are not getting what they paid for, or expected (easy
upgrades of VMs).

~~~
tgeek
"Except every other provider enables swap by default."

This is false and 100% incorrect.

Most AMI's on AWS don't enable SWAP by default whether supplied by a 3rd party
or AWS themselves. Its not a forced thing either way.

In October Rackspace announced that they would be getting rid of SWAP by
default: [http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/changes-
to...](http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/changes-to-swap-on-
cloud-servers)

Linux VM's in Azure don't have Swap by default:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/07/29/swap...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/07/29/swap-
space-in-windows-azure-virtual-machines-running-pre-built-linux-images-
part-1.aspx)

On any host, physical or not, with more than 2GB of RAM people haven't run
SWAP for years now. On cloud providers, even hosts with less than 2GB it is
rarely worth it. It has horrible performance ramifications even when backed by
SSD for the local host and any other tenants on that shared host.

This isn't a scam or them trying to upsell you. This is smart people who know
systems operations making the right call for their customers.

------
darren0
Not enabling swap is extremely common in the hosting business. Even in EC2, a
lot of the AMIs have no swap. This is to prevent users from thrashing your
server hard drives. It's often better to have the customer run out of memory
and realize they have gotten too small of a server then for them to start
thrashing your HD and then just think your hosting is slow.

------
josephlord
Rackspace Cloud Servers do the same, their instructions for enabling swap are
here: [http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/create-
a-l...](http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/create-a-linux-swap-
file)

Their explanation for the change is [1]:

 _Why remove swap?

In a multi-tenant cloud environment certain resources are shared amongst
customers, and in the case of swap the key resource affected is “disk IOPS”
(IOPS stands for “Input/Output Operations per Second”; literally the number of
read/write operations that can be performed on the disk per second). Disk IOPS
are consumed whenever an application performs any sort of read or write to the
physical hard disks.

If Cloud Servers running on the same physical host are running more processes
than their allotted RAM, they will begin to heavily utilize swap. This has the
side effect of consuming a large portion of the available disk IOPS pool,
thereby causing what we refer to as the “noisy neighbor” effect. Put plainly,
this means that other virtual machines can monopolize the disk and affect your
performance, much like a “noisy neighbor” in the real world can disrupt your
quiet dinner plans.

Prior to the change described above, a separate partition, solely dedicated to
swap memory, would be given to each virtual machine by default. In order to
provide the best service and consistent performance, as well as aligning to
industry standard practice, we have removed this default swap partition. We
believe this will lead to better customer experiences across the board._

I've also just added a note about it in a blog post here: [http://blog.human-
friendly.com/a-week-with-docker](http://blog.human-friendly.com/a-week-with-
docker)

I think for beginners having some swap enabled would be a good thing although
there are probably production scenarios where there are risks of massive
performance degradation once you start swapping and you may prefer to know
that you have hit the wall.

On the SSD backed cloud servers I would hope that swap would perform
relatively well compared to spinning rust and if that is how you want to use
the i/o that they allocate you it should be fine.

[1] [http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/changes-
to...](http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/changes-to-swap-on-
cloud-servers)

------
cuu508
I prefer having swap disabled by default and hitting the wall hard when out of
memory. Some swap is nice on desktop systems where memory usage can vary a
lot. On server, RAM usage should be relatively stable. Tune your stack, pick
appropriate plan that leaves some RAM headroom, and be done with it. Ah, and
add alerts for when memory usage goes over some threshold.

~~~
breakall
This makes sense! Can you give a pointer on how to set up the alerts you
mentioned? (home sysadmin here)

~~~
cuu508
I'm using NewRelic's free plan for this. Instructions for setting up their
monitoring daemon on Ubuntu server:
[https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/server/server-monitor-
install...](https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/server/server-monitor-installation-
ubuntu-and-debian)

------
prottmann
Oh my god, really! The Digital Ocean company want to sell bigger machines and
make more money. Incredible ! ;-)

I dont see the problem, you get what you pay for.

And you can enable Swap space, so where is the problem? We talk about 5 bucks
in a month !

------
ghc
No, Digital Ocean doesn't want you to blame them for poor performance, or less
disk space than advertised when you choose a droplet. SSD swap can in no way
replace having adequate RAM. If you really need swap it's easy enough to
create a swap file. But starting with swap space on a VM is the kind of
premature optimization that would make DO look bad.

------
marcusr
Digital Ocean remains very cost effective even if you move up to a $40 a month
plan, compared to the AWS m1.small plan - $40 per month vs $47, and you get an
SSD based server and 4TB bandwidth included, plus 4GB vs 1.7GB RAM. The
smaller Digital Ocean VPSes are great to play around with, but for real work
the $40 remain great, even without swap enabled.

~~~
bryanlarsen
For $44 a month you can get a dedicated Xeon E3 32GB server from OVH in
Montreal.
[http://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/offers.xml](http://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/offers.xml)
Hertzner in Europe is even cheaper.

~~~
jedrek
OVH's support vs DO's is incomparable. The one time I set up a dedicated
server with them, I waited 38 days for it to get going and then the version of
Linux on there was so bad I gave up after two weeks of trying to get it sane.

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edude03
Like cuu508 said server memory usage should be very stable, if you're running
into swap it means you don't have enough memory and you need a bigger droplet.

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CSDude
I use Digital Ocean because my requirements are bounded by disk, not RAM. If I
need more RAM, swapping would not save me, SSDs are still slow compared to
RAM.

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rubiquity
I don't see a problem with this. Have you ever actually used an SSD for swap
space? It's awful, compared to real RAM anyway.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
> Have you ever actually used an SSD for swap space?

Yes

> It's awful, compared to real RAM anyway.

What? SSDs page far faster than HDDs. Comparing an SSD swap to RAM is wrong
headed.

~~~
rubiquity
There is nothing wrong with that comparison in the context of swap.

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darky2005
Interesting, why does Linode enable swap on default? Not concerned about
"noisy neigbor" problem then?

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abjorn
Since when is it a secret that companies want you to choose more expensive
and/or profitable products?

