This morning, a VPS hosting a small e-commerce site (powered by WooCommerce on Ubuntu 22.04) experienced another out-of-memory issue. A colleague (one of the developers) urgently called me, asking to upgrade the VPS due to excessive load.

I pointed out (again, as has often happened in recent weeks) that a VPS with 32GB of RAM (!!!) and 16 dedicated cores (!!!) should not run out of memory with just five simultaneous visits to a small e-commerce site. We host much larger and busier websites on much smaller VPSs. There's likely a WordPress module with a leak, or some interaction between modules causing this issue.

The response: Okay, but just add more RAM and power to solve it.

The illusion of "infinite resources" in the Cloud has led to poor development habits. Sometimes I wonder how much energy and resources we waste (and pollution we generate) due to a lack of basic optimization.

#Tech #Development #CloudComputing #Optimization #WebHosting #WooCommerce #Ubuntu #WordPress #Sustainability #TechRant

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@stefano In a business it might make sense to raise the resources until the problem is fixed. It might also be cheaper to run a larger server instead of getting devs to optimize it/fix it.

@pies There's no limit, here. There's a leak, so resources will be saturated just a few seconds later.
They need to fix.

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