Hi, I have a problem with the webmin service stopping. It is always down when I go to open it, forcing me to use command line to restart it. Moreover, it sometimes crashes in use after an hour or so.
There is plenty of unused RAM and cpu, according to webmin’s own metrics. So I don’t know what is causing all the crashes.
This is on both 2 Debian VPS servers(1 apache +1 nginx). So far the sites there are just empty, testing, static pages I have not yet put anything on.
It’s probably still memory. 
Check the kernel log for OOM (out of memory) killer entries. Are you sure you actually have as much memory as your hosting provider claims? Some hosts using virtualization tools like OpenVZ/Virtuozzo wildly oversell RAM, leading to mysterious service “crashes”.
Webmin doesn’t stop at random. Something is killing it, memory contention is the most common thing that kills processes at random.
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If it is an OpenVZ/Virtuozzo thing, you can check memory usage by looking at beancounters, which is somewhere in /proc, I think. Though I don’t know much about it.
Thanks for the reply! I have a guy looking at it now, and he also says it’s likely memory. I do not use OpenVZ/Virtuozzo. I’m using a Debian 9 VPS with 1 gig ram, via the higly rated ‘Upcloud’ company. No real sites on it yet, just webmin. But it’s Debian 64 bit, and the guy tells me that webmin 64bit needs 2 or 3 gig!!
Currently he’s disabling things like ProFTPd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV, and disabling the automatic start-up of modules when webmin loads which dramatically reduces RAM usage. We’ll see how that goes.
I’d always read that Debian VPS srves can run on half gig. So webmin is a memory hog? Any other ways to scale back its ram usage or ideas?
(At some point, I will be increasing it to 2 gig, but I wanted that for all the sites I want to put on it.)
That’s literally insane. Your guy has no idea what he’s talking about.
Webmin needs ~20MB without Virtualmin, and ~150MB with Virtualmin and module caching turned on (back down to 20MB if caching is turned off). The full system (i.e., not a --minimal install), including ClamAV, realistically needs about 2GB to be happy, but it depends a lot on what you’re doing with the system. But, ClamAV is always ~750MB, no matter what. A Virtualmin installation that’s just serving websites, and not mail, can work in less than 1GB, as long as you give it a little swap memory.
ClamAV and Apache are the big resource users in a full Virtualmin system, not the GUI. Disabling unneeded services is always a good idea and good practice, though.
Here’s our recommendations for low memory systems: https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/system/low-memory
It’s a bit out of date, but the gist of it remains the same.
Ok thank you for the info, i thank that should take care of it.
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