Into The Wild Blue Yonder

After a couple of outages caused by RAM starvation, I moved the site to a larger VM on [Azure][as] until I figured out the issue. I resisted doing that over the past year for several reasons, including informal benchmarking, but it made no sense to have free compute resources as a perk and not take advantage of them.

Based on my investigations, the Linux Dropbox client appears to be the culprit¹. Even on the new 2GB RAM machine (an A1v2 in West Europe), the current version consumes hundreds of megabytes, which caused issues on the 512MB DigitalOcean droplet I used before.

Since I find it ludicrous that Dropbox takes up 650MB of RAM to sync a paltry 25.000 files (7.500 of those are actual posts, with the rest being image assets), I’m planning on rolling my own (one-way) Dropbox client in due course – since I already had a fair amount of working code back when I tried porting my old blog engine to Google App Service, that seems pretty straightforward, although Dropbox‘s API call limits might be a challenge².

In the meantime, the migration was a great incentive to finish the Ansible script I started hacking away at last year. I can now provision a new VM and redeploy this site within minutes (except content syncing via Dropbox), and all I need to do manually is bind the Dropbox instance and update DNS.

I will be moving the site to another machine in a US region soon to get it closer to the bulk of my regular audience, but downtime should be essentially zero – even despite CloudFlare’s recent issues, I intend to keep using them because I have no security concerns regarding this site (there’s no way to login or enter any kind of data via the web), but I also want to fool around with other things (including moving it to both AWS and Google for a few months, again to do some benchmarking).

As to everything else that’s been going on, I intend to resume writing more regularly fairly soon.