Digital Ocean Secretly Wants You to Switch to Larger Droplets?
sinisterlight.com
sinisterlight.com
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.
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.)
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.
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).
then why dont you switch to another one? if other providers are better?
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...
Linux VM's in Azure don't have Swap by default: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/07/29/swap...
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.
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
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...
If you hit the point when it thrashes because the working set isn't fitting in memory then that is obviously a bad place but there is a fair chance you can stay a host size smaller and save money by running some swap.
As for what the cold spots might be I can easily imagine libraries being included/required in an interpreted language and only small fractions of their functionality used. Unlike native libraries they won't just be memory mapped in without using real memory.
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 !
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.