Hi,
Do you have suggestions for kernel tweaks for getting the most out of a RAM limited system?
I am running a service requiring 2GB of RAM (netbird) on a VPS which has just 1 GB of memory. I am doing so because I am a stingy bastard and I use only free VPSs for my personal use so I get what I am paying for.
Because of this hardware limit in about 12 hours from service start I begin swapping a bit too much. This would still be manageable but soon the hypervisor gets really pissed and steals up to 90% of the CPU. So the only solution so far is restarting the docker containers every 12 hours (not great, not terrible).
Looking to improve this, Iam now experimenting with ZRAM and swappiness and it seems some benefit can be achieved by using some of the Linux kernel feaures. Is there anything else I should look into?
If you're idling at 300mb with containerd running, you're not getting better than that with a modern general-purpose distro. As others have said, switching to another vps' free tier that offers more is your single best bet by a mile. About the only options you have on this one are compressed ramdisks being used as swapfile (zram) and literal disk swapfile to get you the rest. It'll be very slow though if you have to load half your workload on shared platter swapfile.