We’re onto part two! Luckily, this is a simple change.

The VM that runs this website is on DigitalOcean. It’s so old (3 years) that it was only provisioned with 1CPU/512MB of memory. This has been sufficient but it’s a tight squeeze with the reverse proxy and MySQL shoehorned onto the same VM. Tonight when I ran OS updates, I noticed this website went down. After looking further, the Linux OOM killer had stepped in and killed MySQL to keep the machine up and running. After starting MySQL, I scaled the droplet to a larger size.

DigitalOcean allows you to scale your droplet but they cannot perform hot add, so the droplet needed to be powered off. Luckily, the $5/mo droplet size has increased to 1CPU/1GB so I was able to double this VMs memory at no cost.

Let’s call this our “get well plan” so the next time updates are run, this site doesn’t go down.