Openg's picture

Hi there,

I'm just moving a website from a small instacen to a medium instance as it's a large website (more than 10,000 visits per day) which has been suffering on a small instance.

I thought to try a medium instance as in theory I could simply boot this from a back-up, but this didn't work out and as I've upgraded the site to joomla 2.5 I thought to boot a Joomla 1.6 appliance onto a medium instance wityh over double the RAM.

To my surprise the medium instance doesn't have 3.75 gigs of memory but the same as the small instance, 1.7  If this is because each core has 1.7 that still makes 3.4, so this doesn't computer as 3.75 gigs.

So what am I getting for the extra outlay and will it help me with a site like this. 

One other question is how easy is it to move the elastic IP from the old instance to the new, is it as simple as disassociating from the old one then moving it over (would I lose it in the process).

Thanks in advance

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Openg's picture

Ok, it seems that what has been launched is a c1.medium server rather than the m1.medium that I wanted, and having looked back over the choices it seems that it wasn't possible to choose an m1.medium - the reason that I was looking for an m1.medium is because I figure that a lot of users plus a template that uses a lot of cross table computes to build pages would need a combo of RAM and some CPU.

Anyhow can I get an m1.medium or do I have to build one some other way?

Many thanks

Openg's picture

The c1.medium seems to be working out pretty well - and moving the elastic IP from one instance to another was very simple (I use Hybridfox to do that). 

Someone from support asked what I would have used the extra RAM on an m1.medium for, well to be honest I wasn't sure what was the issue as the site was something I inherited and was old and badly maintained.

BTW one tip I came up with was how to create a cron job to clear expired cache (we can get over 4gigs in a day) - there are a few complicated suggestions out there but the best one was this script:

find /var/www/joomla/cache/ -type f -mmin +60 -exec rm {} \;

the location of your cache being dependent on your server of course, and the +60 being the age of the files you want to delete (this being over 1hr as I run the cron job every hour).

The site seems to be responding well to treatment :)

John Talarico's picture

I've also fallen into the same trap.  I created a new medium instance assuming I was getting more memory (the primary reason for upgrading from Small) and I just realized that it only has ~1.8 GB memory.  Why is this called a Medium instance when EC2's medium instance has 3.7GB??

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