I have had a collection of low end boxes for a few years. I understand when they are underpowered. One box took 12 hours to compile Ruby, for example. But this box has me puzzled.
Over a year ago, I loaded a Rails app from a production site to do some testing and further development, and easily moved 9GB of data onto the box, which has a 20GB disk and 1GB of memory with OpenVZ. The Rails app does work, maybe a bit slugishly. Sometimes ssh takes well over 30 seconds to get a login prompt. I decided to backup the data and release the machine, but I can't get this VPS to work long enough to do a backup.
rsync starts up fine and runs for a minute or two, and then stops/freezes. tar czf runs for a minute or two and then stops. I can restart it with "fg 1", and it runs a while longer, but it always just stops, long, long before it is complete. With top, I don't see anything putting much load on this box, but just to move forward I stopped nginx and mysqld and tried again. Here is free:
root:/data# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1048576 15564 1033012 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 15564 1033012
Swap: 0 0 0
tar czf still always stops after a minute or two, and often faster if it has just stopped. ulimit shows "unlimited". The gzip and tar processes show .1% memory use. gzip builds up to about 30 seconds of run time after being restarted 15 or twenty times.
I'm going to submit a ticket for this, but I was wondering if this is some kind of standard sleazy procedure where the provider starves the VPS for resources that happens until I notice it and complain? Or do I have a super hot VM neighbor sharing this node? Is there any kind of logging to tell what part of my system is stopping my tar process?
If I can't get this issue resolved, I don't know how I'll retrieve the data from this VPS.