LightSail instance down every 2 or 3 days

Question

I signed up an AWS 1GB LightSail plan less than two months ago with WordPress installed, did a test run for a few weeks, and everything seems fine. So I moved my WordPress website there about two weeks ago. Ever since then the instance just keeps down every two or three days.

https://imgur.com/ewaGlJU

This graph shows my CPU usage and remaining burst capacity. The CPU usage stays inside the sustainable zone most of the time, the remaining burst capacity stays at 100%, and the dips are caused by rebooting. When the instance is down (The site is not accessible, and I can't SSH to it via putty or web either), I have to stop and start the instance, then the remaining capacity drops to 20% and slowly climbs to 100% and stays there, till the next cycle.

https://imgur.com/TnHTNun

This is the last 24 hours memory usage chart. During the normal time, the memory usage is below 40%. The high sparks are caused by me when I remotely connected to it via Visual Studio Code. When my site was down (reported down time at 5:50am CST), the memory usage dropped to 27% (at the end of chart around 12:00UTC).

https://imgur.com/OVwRieu

This morning after I received the site down message (around 5:55am CST), I tried to connect to the instance. The remaining burst capacity stayed at 100%, CPU usage was around 1%, and memory usage was around 27%.
Around 6:40am, (the CPU usage is still 1%, burst capacity 100%, memory usage 27% at the time), I gave up, so I stopped and started the instance. When the instance was up around 6:45am, the CPU usage was around 2%, burst capacity dropped to 20%, memory usage jumped to 35%.

Can anyone help me to figure out what's going on here? and what are other ways to troubleshot this problem?

Thanks

Accepted Answer

Just want to give an update here.  I end up with a cron job which restarts the apache every morning around 5am, and also ipv6 is disabled.  And it's been working for a week now.  No other changes were made.

Answer

Hi,
same here, 2 new instances (Ubuntu 22.04) with 1 website and 1 mysql server 8 without any load (CPU 2% all the day).
First at 6:30, second at 7:30 start use 100% of CPU and i need to restart because i can't SSH into.
No cronjobs or other operations at those times, so there is no reason to start using the resources.
Have you found any solution?

Answer

I had the same issue, instance freezes after a few minutes without any traffic  (webserver). So I went back to my old VPS.

Answer

Lightsail is very unreliable, I'm running two identical lightweight servers on LightSail and EC2, every few months the LightSail server will suddenly slow to a crawl that my website times out. I check the CPU utilization and it's under 1%, the disk usage is extremely low, credits are at a 100%. There's something wrong with the LightSail infrastructure, either some other VM from another user is taking up all the resources and starting the other VM's sharing the hardware or their setup is buggy. The only solution I've found to this is to stop and restart the instance and then it becomes a 100% responsive instantly. My guess is after a stop/start it spins it up on a different underlying hardware. I've never had an issue with the EC2 instance but the Lightsail instance (all of them) like clockwork will slow to a crawl and eventually fail (yup, the alarms go off because it stop responding to Amazon's own monitoring system) and I have to stop/start them again to fix it (or if I leave it for a 12+ hours or a few days, it'll eventually come back online but that's not a solution). Something is VERY VERY broken about Lightsail and Amazon refuses to acknowledge or fix it. I've been reporting this for about 3 years now.

LightSail instance down every 2 or 3 days

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