Question

Resources being consumed by packages that don't exist...?

I’m currently using a droplet with just 2GB of memory and have noticed abnormal resource consumption despite managing only a pair of tiny WordPress installations and one HTML template. I used htop and filtered by memory% and found three culprits:

  • sidekiq 6.0.7 discourse
  • ruby /var/www/discourse
  • unicorn (various processes)

The /var/www/discourse directory doesn’t exist and any attempts to uninstall sidekiq with sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove ruby-sidekiq returns “package is not installed”.

I will say that I tried using Discourse (forum software) on this droplet years ago but have since removed those files. I am concerned that maybe when I created this droplet, I had selected the Discourse image from the Marketplace, but it’s been quite some time since I created the droplet and I can’t remember.

Any advice outside of migrating to a new droplet? I want to be upfront that I’m a hobbyist and self-taught so migrating to a new droplet seems a bit too involved at this point.

Thanks!

EDIT: I do recall that Discourse requires Docker and after confirming it’s installed, I removed Docker entirely using the answer found here: 16.04 - How to completely uninstall docker - Ask Ubuntu

Memory usage went from 1.6GB down to about 1.05GB and I don’t see the sidekiq process running but I’ll continue to monitor because I doubt that it’s was that simple.


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
June 27, 2023

Hi there,

Happy to hear that your memory usage is now looking better after removing the Docker installation!

A couple of other things that you could also try out are:

  1. If you haven’t done so already, rebooting can clear any lingering processes that may be using up resources.

  2. Use systemctl or service commands to check if there are any services related to Discourse, Sidekiq, or Unicorn that are set to run at startup. If there are, you can disable them.

    sudo service --status-all
    

    Look for anything related to Discourse, Sidekiq, or Unicorn. If you find any, you can disable them using the following command (replace servicename with the actual name):

    sudo systemctl disable servicename
    

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby

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