How to optimize GoDaddy Virtual Private Server - Kill Tomcat & Simple Control Panel

While searching for some optimization tips for Virtual Private Servers, I checked out this post which claimed that Godaddy (ahem) VPS sucked BUT offering a solution to those who were on the same boat (in this case, I).  Luckily, I tried out his solution and it has proven to speed up the Godaddy VPS.

To give an overview of our setup, we have a few (like 20 ?) websites hosted on the GoDaddy server and its occasionally bugging down. One optimization I did was to kill some processes that are not needed most of the time which takes up a few MBs of RAM from the server.

So here is the solution that I implemented on the said VPS as suggested by Colin McNamara - basically to stop the Apache Tomcat and Godaddy Simple Control Panel, which are used very rarely. But of course, if you need to use the Simple Control Panel, you can always start it up again then turn it off when you are done.

Here are the steps:

If you are on Windows use the following procedure to get shell access to your GoDaddy VDS -

• you will want to download a ssh client called putty – Download Here


• Copy this file to your desktop, double click putty.exe , and you should see something like this -

• In the host name field I have www.yourdomain.com . replace yourdomainwith your domain name.


• Click on the open button on the bottom right, and a shell should pop up, along with a warning that looks like this (you can click OK to the warning)

• Now skip past the linux section

If you are running Linux or Unix start here -

• Open up a command line terminal


• ssh using your godaddy simple control panel username example -

ssh your-godaddy-control-panel-username@www.yourdomain.com

• If this is your first time connecting to this server, you will be prompted to accept an unkown ssh key into known_hosts, choose yes to accept

Both Windows, Linux and Unix Continue Here –

• Enter your the password you use to access your GoDaddy Simple Control Panel Interface


• You will be presented with what looks like a DOS window, this is called a secure shell terminal. Type in the username you use to access your Godaddy Simple Control Panel and then hit enter

• Now type in the password that you use to access your Simple Control Panel Interface and hit enter

• Congratulations, if you see the window below you are now shelled into your virtual dedicated server.

Change to the Root user

• Now that you are shelled into a Linux device you need to escalate your privileges to get administrator level access. In the Unix world this user is known as Root. You can change to this user, and get full system privileges by using the following command.

su – root

• You will be presented with a password prompt, enter in the same password that you have used to log into your Simple Control Panel Interface


• You are now root, be careful with what command you enter under this user, as you can do some damage if you are careless

Clean out your servers memory

• Most recent Redhat direvatives (including Centos) utilize a tool called yum to add and remove packages. This is also true with your linux servers at GoDaddy.


• you need to install a tool called memhog, it is part of a package called numactl that is normally used to assign specific process’s to specific cpu’s in a multi-core system. We will be using it today to fix GoDaddy’s memory hogging application

yum install numactl

• choose yes to all the prompts, and numactl will automatically be downloaded and installed on your server

Stop GoDaddy Simple Control Panel, and Tomcat, and tell them not to start automatically when your server restarts.

• Tomcat is a special type of webserver for Java based applications. Godaddy uses it to run their control panel interface. 99.99999 percent of users will not need to use Tomcat. If you do need to use Tomcat then you are a technical user and will know what to do.


• In Linux, server applications are called daemons. The are executed by init scripts. We will use these scripts to turn off these server applications


• Turn off the TurboPanel daemon ( this is the process that runs your simple control panel web interface

/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop

• Next we need to turn off Tomcat

/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop

• Now that we have these services turned off, we need to make sure that they don’t come back when we reboot the server. We can do this by using the chkconfig command.


• Stop the Simple Control Panel Interface from starting automatically by executing the following command

chkconfig turbopanel off

• Stop the Tomcat server from starting automatically by executing the following command

chkconfig tomcat55 off

Clean the mess GoDaddy made of your servers memory

• A couple steps back we installed numactl. The executable we wanted out of this package is memhog. Issue the following command to take your memory back. This command will overwrite 200 megabytes of your memory, allowing the rest of your applications to get access to that memory.

memhog 200m

• This will Clear out the memory that GoDaddy’s application took over, and allow the rest of your daemons to run fine.

Great, my server is running better now. But I want to use my Simple Control Panel Interface. How do I do that?

• Easy, all you need to do is temporarily start the turbopanel daemon. When you are done making changes, you can turn it off again

/etc/init.d/tomcat55 start

/etc/init.d/turbopanel start

• When you are done, don’t forget to turn it off

/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop

/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop

********************************

NOTE: if you cannot locate chckconfig, try adding /sbin, like:

/sbin/chkconfig turbopanel off (and)
/sbin/chkconfig tomcat55 off

I hope this solution would work for you too!

Source: Why GoDaddy Linux Virtual Dedicated Hosting Sucks & How to Fix It