Server Reboot and Memory Limits

Yesterday at 7:13pm central time, the server rebooted. I've not been able to determine why yet.

However, during the course of investigating the problem, I learned that we're topping out on memory. Ready to play some math games with me?

Our virtual machine(VM) has about 300mb memory. This is the largest I could buy without the monthly cost going to triple what it is now.

Normally, that'd be plenty. On a 32-bit machine, NarniaMUCK's memory usage hovers around 50mb.

But. The VM is a 64-bit machine. Or more precisely, the machine it runs on is a 64-bit machine--and so is the VMs it creates. So memory addressing sizes double--which tends to double the memory consumption of a process.

Okay, so NarniaMUCK is using ~100mb (right at this moment? 96744kb) of 300mb. Well below the limit...except:

* There's about ~100mb of essential processes that machine runs just to...exist. Things like sshd, ftp server, etc.
* We were running a test copy of NarniaMUCK--so that program modifications wouldn't disrupt game-play. Another 100mb.

So basically, we were hovering around 300mb the whole time. Oops.

The easiest thing to eliminate with the biggest impact is the test copy of the server. Which I've already done. I'll make other arrangements for a test server, I've not decided on the specifics yet.

So that's the news. If I learn more about the reboot--you'll see an update here!