Hi all,

I've recently purchased a vps server for my property portal as it grew too big for shared hosting. This site depends upon uploading properties via XML feeds and copying the photos from other websites for properties. In order to create uniform sizes, each photo is resized via imagemagick into a full size and thumbnail. All this is done via a cron job.

Last night the site was shut down by the server hosts and I was informed that it had overloaded the hardware node.

I've written a script to check the resources the site is using at any one time and shut down a cron job script that is close to overloading the system but the server company wont give me any indication of what limits I should set this shutdown script at.

Can anyone give me an idea of what sort of limits I should stop the scripts at? This is the info I received from the server company when they shut down the site:

top - 03:12:21 up 13 days, 6:42, 0 users, load average: 7.21, 6.48, 4.55
Tasks: 44 total, 5 running, 39 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 33.2%us, 3.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 63.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 4190208k total, 681964k used, 3508244k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
10075 costafre 21 0 114m 3100 1988 R 10.7 0.1 0:00.34 convert
11955 costafre 17 0 422m 318m 7200 S 0.9 7.8 0:19.70 php5

I may be very wrong but it doesn't seem excessive to me. They tell me that the package is self-managed and can't advise memory limits for scripts, but shut it down soon enough...

The server is running an Intel Xeon E5400/E5500 Series CPU with 4Gb RAM using Linux CentOS and cPanel. The software that seems to be upsetting it is imagemagick 6.5.8

Any help would be fantastic
.