One constantly posted question on LowEndBox and LowEndTalk is — how to get the same setup as LowEndBox, a WordPress site that runs on cheap VPS with 80MB of memory? Instead of doing a step-by-step explanation (damn I hate writing long blog posts), I decided to wrap it into a bash script that does it all.
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It is based on my previous script here, and it has been tested on both Debian 5 “Lenny” and Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”. Sorry no other distributions are supported. It is currently hosted at github so feel free to branch it and tune it to your heart’s desire.
Usage
Here is a quick step by step on how to set up a WordPress blog running on Nginx, PHP/FastCGI and MySQL on a low end box. Let’s assume that you are going to set up a blog on hostname “blog.example.com“.
- Go and buy a cheap VPS. Yes, you know where to find cheap virtual servers under $7/month, don’t you? 🙂 I am using my 6 pound/year RackVM VPS with 128MB memory to test this script, and the performance turns out to be quite good. YMMV.
Make sure it is either a Debian or a Ubuntu distro though.
- After gaining root access to your VPS,
# wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/lowendbox/lowendscript/raw/master/setup-debian.sh ... # bash setup-debian.sh system ... # bash setup-debian.sh exim4 ... # bash setup-debian.sh nginx ... # bash setup-debian.sh mysql ... # bash setup-debian.sh php ... # bash setup-debian.sh wordpress blog.example.com ...
- Now altering your DNS entry to point
blog.example.comto your new VPS (or alter your local/etc/hostsentry). Navigate to it from your browser, and you should be presented with WordPress set up page. Fill in your blog’s name, admin’s password and contact email, and your new WordPress is online!Just repeat the last step (running
bash setup-debian.sh wordpress <hostname>) to set up more blogs on the same box.
That’s it!
Software Stack
It’s pretty similar to my own stack that runs LowEndBox.com.
- dropbear to replace openssh. Invoked from xinetd.
- inetutils-syslogd to replace rsyslog.
- exim4 to replace sendmail (if installed). Re-configured to allow Internet delivery.
- cron
- nginx
- mysql. Re-configured to remove innodb support, remove query cache and reduce key buffer size.
- php with built-in FastCGI interface. Running only 1 child process and respawn after 5,000 requests.
The lowendscript is also
- Removing some commonly bundled applications that should not be there in the first place for a minimal distro (apache2, sendmail, bind9, samba, nscd, etc).
- MySQL root is given a new password (which can be found in
~root/.my.cnf) - Installing each WordPress site under /var/www/<hostname>. It will create appropriate database, users and password for the site.
I have to say that it is still “work in progress”, but if you want to figure out the internals please check the source code of that bash script.
Memory Usage
I am testing the same script on the following 3 systems:
- Ubuntu 10.04 64bit (RackVM)
- Debian 5 64bit (RackVM)
- Debian 5 32bit (VPSGuy)
They are all showing different memory usage. I am taking the snapshot of memory usage AFTER 10 page loads on the WordPress blog that has been created to ensure PHP process is fully loaded.
Ubuntu 10.04 64bit
root@ubuntu64:~# ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.5 23300 1536 ? Ss 06:58 0:00 init
root 10124 0.0 0.5 23576 1496 ? Ss 07:34 0:00 dropbear -i
root 15742 0.0 0.7 17880 1944 pts/0 Ss 07:35 0:00 -bash
root 15754 0.0 0.4 14960 1084 pts/0 R+ 07:35 0:00 ps aux
root 24290 0.0 0.3 12508 788 ? S 07:22 0:00 /usr/sbin/syslo
root 24524 0.0 0.3 21064 1004 ? Ss 07:22 0:00 cron
root 25689 0.0 0.3 19512 972 ? Ss 07:22 0:00 /usr/sbin/xinet
mysql 26346 0.0 4.2 61812 11248 ? Ssl 07:23 0:00 /usr/sbin/mysql
www-data 27920 0.0 2.6 87768 7048 ? Ss 07:23 0:00 /usr/bin/php-cg
www-data 27922 0.5 15.0 122460 39432 ? S 07:23 0:04 /usr/bin/php-cg
103 30162 0.0 0.3 44356 1000 ? Ss 07:24 0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4
root 30267 0.0 0.3 28104 932 ? Ss 07:24 0:00 nginx: master p
www-data 30268 0.0 0.8 28744 2196 ? S 07:24 0:00 nginx: worker p
root@ubuntu64:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 262144 100500 161644 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 100500 161644
Swap: 0 0 0
Memory Usage: 98.1MB
Debian 5 64bit
debian64:~# ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.2 10304 740 ? Ss 12:22 0:00 init [2]
106 1414 0.0 0.3 42708 1004 ? Ss 12:26 0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4
www-data 1655 0.0 2.5 72028 6560 ? Ss 12:26 0:00 /usr/bin/php-cg
www-data 1657 0.9 11.7 98500 30928 ? S 12:26 0:03 /usr/bin/php-cg
www-data 3126 0.0 0.7 28380 1912 ? S 12:29 0:00 nginx: worker p
root 7668 0.1 0.5 23340 1528 ? Rs 12:31 0:00 dropbear -i
root 7831 0.0 0.6 17472 1716 pts/0 Ss 12:32 0:00 -bash
root 7836 0.0 0.3 14720 980 pts/0 R+ 12:32 0:00 ps aux
root 20169 0.0 0.3 18540 936 ? Ss 12:22 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
root 24462 0.0 0.2 12236 732 ? S 12:25 0:00 /usr/sbin/syslo
root 25637 0.0 0.3 19256 952 ? Ss 12:25 0:00 /usr/sbin/xinet
root 25694 0.0 0.5 28380 1552 ? Ss 12:25 0:00 nginx: master p
root 32427 0.0 0.2 3872 588 ? S 12:26 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bi
mysql 32466 0.0 3.0 50420 8124 ? Sl 12:26 0:00 /usr/sbin/mysql
root 32468 0.0 0.2 3772 592 ? S 12:26 0:00 logger -p daemo
debian64:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 262144 61008 201136 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 61008 201136
Swap: 0 0 0
Memory Usage: 59.6MB
Debian 5 32bit
debian32:~# ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.1 1980 688 ? Ss 23:34 0:00 init [2]
root 14064 0.0 0.1 1704 512 ? S 23:52 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bi
mysql 14119 0.0 1.7 20056 6968 ? Sl 23:52 0:00 /usr/sbin/mysql
root 14120 0.0 0.1 1628 536 ? S 23:52 0:00 logger -p daemo
www-data 15968 0.0 1.2 16352 4996 ? Ss 23:53 0:00 /usr/bin/php-cg
www-data 15971 0.5 4.7 29436 18576 ? S 23:53 0:01 /usr/bin/php-cg
root 16040 0.0 0.3 2700 1464 ? Rs 23:53 0:00 dropbear -i
root 16119 0.0 0.1 1880 684 ? S 23:44 0:00 /usr/sbin/syslo
root 16133 0.0 0.3 2780 1536 pts/0 Ss 23:54 0:00 -bash
root 17728 0.0 0.2 2352 896 ? Ss 23:45 0:00 /usr/sbin/xinet
www-data 17758 0.0 0.3 5004 1488 ? S 23:54 0:00 nginx: worker p
root 27834 0.0 0.3 4548 1236 ? Ss 23:47 0:00 nginx: master p
root 28146 0.0 0.2 2296 896 pts/0 R+ 23:57 0:00 ps aux
102 32065 0.0 0.2 6104 900 ? Ss 23:49 0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4
debian32:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 262144 44272 217872 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 44272 217872
Swap: 0 0 0
Memory Usage: 43.2MB
So to put that in summary form
- Ubuntu 10.04 uses significantly more memory than Debian 5 (PHP5.3/MySQL5.1 vs. PHP5.2/MySQL5.0). So pick your distro wisely and maybe you don’t need the latest and greatest if your application does not need it.
- 32bit also uses quite a bit less than 64bit, running exactly the same version of stack. That pretty much confirms what I posted before.
And hopefully the above script is useful for your next WordPress splog farm 😛
LEA (LowEndAdmin) is the original founder of LowEndBox and the visionary who gave rise to an entire movement around minimalist, efficient hosting. In 2008, LEA launched LowEndBox with a simple but powerful idea: that it was possible to run meaningful applications, web servers, VPNs, mail servers, and more – on small, low-cost virtual machines with minimal resources.
At a time when most infrastructure discussions were dominated by high-end servers and enterprise platforms, LEA championed the opposite approach: lightweight Linux distros, self-managed servers, open source software, and thoughtful optimization. This philosophy gave birth to the term “Low End Box”, which would come to define a new genre of hosting tailored to developers, tinkerers, and budget-conscious users around the world.
Through LowEndBox and its companion forum, LowEndTalk, LEA built the foundation for what would become one of the most active and enduring communities in the hosting world, prioritizing knowledge-sharing, transparency, and accessibility.
After several years of nurturing the site and community, LEA stepped away from active involvement, passing the torch to a new generation of admins, contributors, and moderators. Today, LEA remains a respected figure in the LowEnd ecosystem, credited with launching a platform and philosophy that continues to influence thousands of infrastructure providers and users globally.
LowEndBox’s legacy, and its thriving community, is a direct result of LEA’s original vision.
great one, thanks for sharing. now, who’s up to convert it to centos? 🙂
Why would you want to do that?
Nice job. Thanks.
Will check against my own configuration.
Very cool! 🙂
I can see what I can do to convert it to CentOS.
I get the following when I tested it for my main blog. Is their anyway to tune this? I have little knowledge of nginx
502 Bad Gateway
nginx/0.6.32
Another great post with much more info then the old post.
again when are you providing such a nice tutorial on postfix install and full configuration for virtual domains
Many Thanks.
@Qwizie — 502 Bad Gateway means Nginx cannot talk to PHP fastcgi.
Make sure your PHP are running. I have installed the init script at /etc/init.d/php-cgi, and just do
invoke-rc.d php-cgi startto start it.It did work until I change A record for my major traffic site to the IP and now that’s all I get.
vps:~# invoke-rc.d php-cgi start
Starting php-cgi: php-cgi/usr/bin/php-cgi already running.
invoke-rc.d: initscript php-cgi, action “start” failed.
Is their a way to tune PHP to handle more PHP CGI requests?
Will then I guess you need to “restart” rather than “start” then. You can put
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=3
/etc/default/php-cgi
or whatever number of children processes you want there. But remember they all use up memory 🙂
@LEA :”respawn after 5,000 requests”
Can you give explanation to this?
Thanks
Hmm…
i mean, why 5000 ?
Not some smaller number
Just some random number that works for me. Restarting the child process before too much memory leak (if any). Don’t you also reboot your Windoze box every 7 days? 🙂
Nope, my Windows machine has been running for like 2 months straight without a hitch.
Lies… Everyone knows Microsoft products are incapable of running more than 24 hours without falling over.
Why are you commenting on a 2011 post?
And about Microsoft Products, maybe it depends on the provider. I have 512MB Windows 2008 VPS which is running for 2 months without problem. The only restart will be happened if I turn on the automatic updates,
I don’t restart any windows boxes ever, because I don’t have any.
Installed it at debian 5 32-bit(spacerich canis) and it’s wordpress 3 for only 50MB total usage! my initial try of normal wp3 installation on lighttpd eats more than 384MB (from a how-to-forge tutorial)… I have to downgrade back to 2.9.2… I’ll stick with this setup for now. Thank you! 😀
heh
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=75
and my.cnf is skip-innodb and 100 conn and to cache.
top – 08:35:27 up 3:24, 3 users, load average: 26.27, 15.94, 7.08
Tasks: 52 total, 22 running, 22 sleeping, 8 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 93.1%us, 6.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 524288k total, 521748k used, 2540k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached
It loads at times, and others not. I wanted to see if I could put a high traffic site on a lowendbox using this setup.
@LEA.
OK, thanks for the clarification. Actually i set the number to 50 request. And yes, just a random number :D.
Hmm.. i don’t use windows , just use ubuntu 😀
@Qwizie – 75 is most definitely too many for probably any size of sites on a single box. Usually I will only use 1-2 times the number of CPU cores (unless your PHP processes spend too much time on IO wait, which is a problem in its own), and for a simple WordPress site like LowEndBox.com, PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=1 is more than enough. Too much causes to use too much memory. And in your case there is no swap so the process probably just get killed.
@bekanosky – 50 is probably fine since PHP starts up pretty fast.
@LEB
I’m receiving around 150-200 HTTP connections a second. So I increased it to the amount I had around in my lighttpd config on my dedicated. But I was still stocked to see that it somewhat worked.
150-200 HTTP connections per second does not translate to 150-200 PHP requests per second, does it? Your OpenVZ VPS is running next to no memory and with 75 FastCGI PHP processes, even at 10MB each (even WordPress 3 brings them to ~30MB) will get you to 750MB — so your VPS is probably suffering from OOM at the moment.
My other site with ~75 HTTP req/second uses about 6 PHP processes, just to give a point of reference.
LEA,
how to check http req/second and php request/second?
@Josh — for HTTP, use a script to query Nginx status module.
For PHP requests, well grep your access log for that 🙂
I get error at step 4, please let me know how to solve 😀
bash setup-debian.sh nginx
root@endor:~# bash setup-debian.sh nginx
Reading package lists…
Building dependency tree…
Reading state information…
Package nginx is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package nginx has no installation candidate
nginx installed for nginx
setup-debian.sh: line 147: /etc/nginx/conf.d/lowendbox.conf: No such file or directory
invoke-rc.d: unknown initscript, /etc/init.d/nginx not found.
Distro info: Ubuntu 10.04 – (x64) – PyGrub
@minhmeo
I guess you should look at your /etc/apt/sources.list
some working example : http://www.asim.pk/2010/07/25/not-getting-a-package-on-ubuntu/
and then run ‘apt-get update’
@Minh — Nginx is part of the universe repository on Ubuntu, so make sure you have universe on your apt/source.list. For example,
Maybe I will need to check that in the script…
@bekanosky: Thanks, but i got another error from first step 😀
E: Type ‘main’ is not known on line 1 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list
E: Type ‘main’ is not known on line 1 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list
E: The list of sources could not be read.
@LowEndAdmin: Great, it’s working fine 😀 Many thanks!!!
When i upgrade plugin on WordPress, it required FTP info, what should i do now? Should i type SSH info?
@minhmeo
ah, you should ask asim for this issue :D.
But, i guess you missed ‘#’ in first line when doing copy-paste
@Minh — no one should use FTP for upgrading WordPress. Well this script is only getting the sites going and as a demo on how to script something to bootstrap a site running on a low end box. Although for production sites I’ll put more thoughts on how to maintain it in the long run.
Also you might want to look at using subversion to maintain your WordPress installations, including plugins.
Thanks! i will upgrade manually 😀
After doing all steps, i run “free -m” to see ram usage and it’s 115mb, is it normal? 😀
I do “reboot” and my site get error: 502 Bad Gateway
I see that you told “Qwizie — 502 Bad Gateway means Nginx cannot talk to PHP fastcgi.”
and i run command “invoke-rc.d php-cgi start” or “invoke-rc.d php-cgi restart” but system say: -bash: invoke-rc.d: command not found
How about replacing MySQL by SQLite database in wordpress? it use less memory.
You can also replace exim4 by ‘ssmtp’ (Extremely simple MTA to get mail off the system to a Mailhub).
This look great, I’ll try it out when rackvm goes back online.
@Minh — might need to use
update-rc.d php-cgi defaultsto add php-cgi to RC. Please dig Debian manual on that although I should have added that into the script. And are you sure you are using Debian/Ubuntu based system — sysv-rc package should have been installed. Also you need to be running as root 🙂@Unknown — SQLite is not supported by stock WordPress, and as I am always grabbing the latest release there is no guarantee that 3rd party plugins will work. There are other excellent blogging engines such as Habari that uses SQLite. I am only using WordPress because LowEndBox uses it, and it seems to be a quite popular choice.
As of SSMTP yes I have used that in my 32MB VPS example last year. But it’s error prone, no queue and little guarantee of delivery — unless you are running a stable relay somewhere else. I much prefer to have a box that is self-contained.
If folks have a Gmail account, they can use SSMTP through Gmail.
http://www.pungit.com/tag/ssmtp-on-debian/
Does any body know how I get nginx to display directory listings?
@LowEndAdmin: Yes, i’m running as root. I still get error
root@endor:~# update-rc.d php-cgi defaults
-bash: update-rc.d: command not found
@minh
maybe ‘/etc/init.d/php-cgi start’ will do the job
@bekanosky:
root@endor:~# /etc/init.d/php-cgi start
* Starting php-cgi php-cgi start-stop-daemon: Unable to open pidfile ‘/var/run/www/php.pid’ for writing: No such file or directory (No such file or directory)
Looks like you did not run `bash setup-debian.sh php` properly? It should have
I am pretty sure it has been tested on Ubuntu 10.04. It actually calls `update-rc.d php-cgi defaults` at the end of installing PHP so PHP/FastCGI will start after reboot.
Something wrong on your end.
The same thing happens to me. I already reinstalled my VPS three times with the same OS (Ubuntu 10.04 32-Bit) and followed the instructions you provided. The script was run without any errors encountered and I was able to set up a blog. The only problem is whenever the server is restarted, php-cgi and mysql does not automatically run.
The reason why this is happening in Ubuntu only is because whenever you restart the server, the `/var/run/www` directory is deleted automatically. I tried this script in Debian 5 and there are no problems there.
My only workaround is to manually run the following commands manually after each server reboot:
invoke-rc.d mysql start
mkdir -p /var/run/www
chown www-data:www-data /var/run/www
invoke-rc.d php-cgi start
Do you have any way to make this automated or at least make the functionality working? I tried editing the files /etc/nginx/fastcgi_php and /etc/init.d/php-cgi to change the directory of the php.sock and php.pid but it’s not helping either.
I still have the same issue. Any workaround/fix for this?
I had the same issue, the problem is that ubuntu uses a RAM-disk for /var/run, so changes to the dir structure are not preserved through a restart.
If you dig through the /etc/init/mounted-* config files you can probably figure a way to make changes permanent, but I just modified the init script to move the socket and pid files to a directory on /var/www which I know is on a disk partition.
I have fixed this problem by editing the script and changing the location of where the pid file is stored prior to running the script. Instead I am installing it to /var/lib/www.
Apparently /var/run is not a good spot to put things. Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=996892
I have actually created a fork of the original script on Github to add functionality for Drupal installations and fixed this bug along the way.
https://github.com/sk33lz/lowendscript
LowEndAdmin – Any idea how I get nginx to output directory listings for directory’s with no index file. I currently get a 403 error.
Jack.
I have the same error
403 Forbidden
nginx/0.7.67
@Jackk:
Put autoindex on; inside the location directive for that directory.
It isn’t, however, that simple to make it work. You have to move the root statement out of the location. (More info)
@Jackk — http://lmgtfy.com/?q=nginx+directory+list&l=1
@LowEndAdmin: I did exactly as your tutorial and it’s working fine, wordpress blog run fine, but ram usage so high (>500mb ram) so i “reboot” and i get error “502 Bad Gateway”