Optimizing Windows VPS for .NET 2.0

[CorneO]

Hi,

I'm still pretty new to running my own VPS and I'm looking for some tips on trimming down the memory usage on my VPS so that I can run .NET 2.0 and MS SQL Server 2005 Express along with .NET 1.1 and MSDE. I have been searching the forum and google but not much luck.

I saw a thread that spoke about ClamAV, anybody here using it instead of DrWeb and Kaspersky? Would you recomend it?
[forum thread (http://forums.deftechgroup.com/showthread.php?t=63)]

Thanks,
Corne

[Milovan]

Hi Corne,

Let's consider that you have a VPS with 384 MB of RAM and Plesk for Windows as the control panel. Depending on applications installed with Plesk, your VPS would use around 250 - 300 MB, give or take (this, by default, would include TomCat, two MySQL instances, MSDE, Sitebuilder, etc). That's quite a bit of RAM there.

If you don't plan to use MySQL, TomCat, Sitebuilder and similar "add-ons", you can easily remove it from Control Panel on your VPS (Click on "Plesk" and then the "change" button). Otherwise, you would need to consider a higher plan. If you would remove all of the above, you would have around 180 - 200 MB of RAM usage, which is pretty solid. Even so, installing MS SQL Server 2005 Express might give you some hard time. If not (you install it successfully), I am confident you will run into resource problems at some point. .NET 2.0/1.1 aren't taking up any resources really, until you actually use them in some way. Your biggest memory consumptions will be caused by two SQL instances; with or without a control panel.

If you don't need things such as spamassassin and DrWeb, you should remove these as well in order to save up some RAM.

Hope that was helpful!

[CorneO]

Thanks Milovan.

I trimmed the Plesk installation down a bit last night. I removed Tomcat and the java runtime, Sitebuilder, SpamAssasin, Perl, Python and DrWeb and I upgraded MSDE to SQL Server 2005 Express. The Plesk control panel is happy with the SQL Express upgrade. SQL Express is also a lot more effitient with the memory.

Right now my memory usage is about 285MB with me logged into the Plesk control panel and 1 Mambo website running. I have a few more sites to set up and will see how it runs then. I tried installing DotNetNuke but that was a joke. PHP and PHP applications seem to be a bit less memory hungry.

I would like to use some alternative to DrWeb. I tried the ClamAV but did not get it right plus I did not like that I had to install Cygwin to run it. I don't like not having an antivirus program running.

Thanks,
Corne

[nadzri]

Have you tried http://w32.clamav.net/ ? You don't need cygwin anymore.

[Milovan]

Glad to hear you got your RAM lowered down there! What you may want to consider is CureIt, which is a free AV DrWeb product. It doesn't scan in real time, but it's pretty efficient once you run it. You can download it from http://download.drweb.com/drweb+cureit/.