Vps – My VPS ubuntu server is very slow

ubuntu-12.04vps

I just installed a frech copy of Ubuntu 12.04 on my vps because my old installation was very slow, unfortunately this did not fix the problem.

With slow I mean requests for my PHP websites take a long time, very slow (30 sec per request) to slow (3+ sec per request). When it's really bad SSH is also laggish.

The websites are:

slow?

very slow: Here is a picture of loading a clean install of wordpress
slow: here is a picture of loading a small PHP based website

the vps

The VPS has 256mb ram and an 25GB hdd. Besides serving the 2 small websites it isn't doing anything AFAIK.

What have I installed

  • Clean Ubuntu server 12.04
  • LAMP stack
  • few things like git and nodejs (not using both)
  • ossec (because I thought my server was getting hammered)
  • munin

What I already tried / done

  • I installed munin so that I could watch io speed and such. The problem is that I don't know where to look for in the munin report.
  • I checked logs and don't see anything strange (although I don't really know where to look for besides strange / repetitive errors and GET requests).

  • I configured Apache MPM to:

    <IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
     StartServers          5
     MinSpareServers       5
     MaxSpareServers      10
     MaxClients           40
     MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>

    (apache is using prefork, the default)

Stats

I copied the munin report as it appeared at 4:50 last night to a site hosted on a shared webhost. Note that tonight my mysql crashed somewhere after 1:00 (which is a new problem altogether), so therefor the graph for last night might look strange.

Can anyone help me get my VPS up to normal speed?

EDIT:

Thanks for the replies.

The VPS is 10 bucks a month and is from directvps.nl (Dutch host and I'm also dutch).

I did two speed tests for disk IO:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 23.1506 s, 46.4 MB/s

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 39.3796 s, 27.3 MB/s

Anyway: how can I prove to my VPS host that it is to slow? I can understand a server being busy slowing a website down. But 5-30 sec loadtime for a normal PHP webpage?

EDIT 2:

I mailed the VPS host, and they think it's the amount of RAM. They offered a free up to 512MB for a limited time to see if that solves the problem.

I'll post the difference here.

Best Answer

It is not your VPS per se, but from the chart it looks like your disc is TERRIBLY overloaded - your latency is 30x higher than it should be.

Either you are doing it do it, or someone else is doing it (another VPS) or the system in general is way too slow for the VPS it runs (not that rare on low end VPS that are cheap).

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