our experience is that a 256mb slice is slightly small for the resources
needed for a chef-server. You need two "instances" of the server working,
and that's as many rails apps (i guess merb requires a little less) as you
can get to work "properly" in a 256mb slice, but with chef-server you also
need couchdb and stompserver. For us it didn't work properly until we
upgraded to a 512mb slice.
my suggestion is to use a 360mb slice from linode (for example, costs the
same as a 256mb slicehost), or to upgrade your current 256 to a higher plan,
and use the extra resources for other things you might need. Remember that
with a 256mb slice you're "losing" a good chunk on basic system processes,
whereas when you upgrade to a higher plan, all that extra memory is "clean",
as opposed to having two 256mb slices.
Also nginx is pretty light, yeah 
Albert Llop
Tech Department
2009/7/6 Arjuna Christensen aj@opscode.com
On 6/07/2009, at 10:34 AM, Adam Jacob wrote:
It's going to depend on what you are serving, and how. If you are
really memory constrained, I would start looking at running a pair of
thins and chef-client via cron.
Blaming the web server was a little out of line of me, and my knee jerk
reaction is to install a lighter weight reverse proxy; however; depending on
the number of nodes you're using you may not need to run a reverse proxying
webserver at all (apache, nginx, lighttpd, haproxy, .., ..) unless you
require SSL connection termination.
Hope this helps!
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:20 PM, Joe Van Dykjoe@fixieconsulting.com
wrote:
Should I be expected to run chef on a 256 megabyte server, if that's all
it's doing?
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
23665 couchdb 20 0 340m 40m 1300 S 0 15.9 38:16.26 beam.smp
23881 chef 20 0 111m 38m 1788 S 0 14.9 2:04.86 ruby
4848 root 20 0 86952 26m 1776 S 0 10.4 28:59.37 chef-client
3615 chef 20 0 86340 23m 1192 S 0 9.2 54:01.36 chef-indexer
23884 chef 20 0 109m 14m 1684 S 0 5.8 0:10.02 ruby
3617 root 20 0 69164 9852 992 S 0 3.8 17:08.68 stompserver
7272 www-data 20 0 726m 5632 2056 S 0 2.1 19:06.03 apache2
7373 www-data 20 0 726m 5592 2052 S 0 2.1 19:03.68 apache2
It's swapping a bit.
--
Opscode, Inc.
Adam Jacob, CTO
T: (206) 508-7449 E: adam@opscode.com
--
AJ Christensen, Software Engineer
Opscode, Inc.
E: aj@opscode.com adam@opscode.com