cPanel VPS Optimized
Published April 6, 2008 by Me
Some great news came in the form of a newsletter from cPanel this week. cPanel (aka cPanel/WHM) is the most popular control panel used on servers and VPSs everywhere, particularly throughout the shared hosting industry, because of its ease of use, friendly interface, and the fact that, as everyone else uses it, you better have it too 
One of the growing concerns recently has been the amount of memory cPanel uses, particularly on VPSs. A growing concern, that is, until the arrival of this newsletter:
cPanel VPS Optimized ------------------------------- cPanel VPS Optimized is a new version of cPanel / WHM specifically designed to run on Virtual Private Servers. cPanel VPS Optimized provides the feature rich functionality of cPanel / WHM while reducing memory usage by up to 60% on VPS instances. cPanel VPS Optimized represents a great step forward for cPanel customers. The reduction in memory usage for each install allows web hosts the ability to host more domains per virtual machine. This increase enables hosts to provide a more efficient and eco-friendly server base with fewer physical machines. The upgrade to cPanel VPS optimized will require no interaction. Once cPanel VPS Optimized has reached the build tree on your server, automatic updates ( or manual) will upgrade the current cPanel / WHM installation to a cPanel VPS Optimized installation. cPanel VPS Optimized is currently only in EDGE builds. Information about cPanel VPS optimized can be found at: http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpvps/ TailWatchd ------------------------------ TailWatchd is a new concept in log processing from cPanel. Previously, three daemons were used to gather information from mail and bandwidth logs (antirelayd, eximstats and cpbandwd). These daemons have been deprecated and replaced with a more robust and more lightweight TailWatchd. The move to this new system will reduce load due to log processing and allows for a more robust interface with the daemon. This daemon with all three log processing drivers uses less memory than just eximstats! Technical information about TailWatchd can be found at: http://www.cpanel.net/support/articles/tailwatchd.html Other Updates -------------------------------- Along with these two new advancements, modifications have been made to the cPanel / WHM product to reduce cpu and memory usage. We hope that you will find these advancements a positive step for your operations. There are many more great steps in the cPanel development path which will enhance your experiences with cPanel products.
Whilst I don’t entirely agree with cPanel’s views about hosting more domains on VPSs running leaner on memory with this new release, the memory that this frees up will certainly improve performance.
Anyway, I decided to put it to the test and rolled a spare VPS with just 256Mb of memory forward to the EDGE release. (NB: It’s not advisable to do this on a production VPS as EDGE releases can and do have minor bugs still needing to be ironed out).
Having updated to the EDGE release, and with Fantastico and RVSkins also installed, I set about doing some minor tweaks to get the memory usage down below a self-set target of 128Mb. Half an hour or so later, I had it cracked 
total used free Mem: 262144 128676 133468 -/+ buffers/cache: 128676 133468 Swap: 0 0 0 Total: 262144 128676 133468
Left running for 3 or 4 days with 4 small test domains on it, the VPS continued to idle at between 128Mb and 190Mb of memory usage.
All I can say is Go cPanel! 
Filed under VPS, programming, scripts, virtual private server, web site
