With the growth of cross-border e-commerce, live streaming, cross-border gaming, and foreign trade in Southeast Asia, Singapore cloud servers have become a popular choice due to their direct network connections to mainland China, low latency, and excellent stability. However, many companies may encounter freezing or slow response times when using Singapore cloud servers. This freezing doesn't just mean the website or application is inaccessible; it can also manifest as spikes in CPU load, abnormal memory usage, and excessive disk I/O latency. To fully resolve this issue, the cause must be analyzed from multiple perspectives, including hardware, software, network, and business architecture.
Ⅰ. Insufficient Hardware Resources
1. Inadequate Configuration
To save costs, many companies choose entry-level configurations, such as a cloud server with a single CPU core and 1GB of RAM. While this configuration can run lightweight websites, it can experience lag or even crashes once traffic increases or the business logic becomes complex.
Causes: Insufficient CPU cores to handle a large number of requests simultaneously. Insufficient memory, with limited cache and process space, can trigger frequent swapping, significantly slowing down performance.
Solution: Upgrade your configuration appropriately based on your business scale, for example, starting with at least 2 cores and 4GB of RAM. Separate modules like the database, large cache, and file storage into independent instances to reduce pressure on a single server.
2. Low Disk Performance
Some low-cost plans offered by Singapore cloud providers use standard SATA cloud drives, which have low IOPS (Input and Output Operations Per Second) and throughput, and are prone to system stalls during high-concurrency reads and writes.
Optimization: Choose SSD cloud drives, especially enterprise-grade NVMe SSDs. Enable RAID 10 or RAID 1+0 to improve read and write speeds and redundancy.
Ⅱ. Network Issues
1. Insufficient Bandwidth
Bandwidth determines data transfer speed. If a Singapore cloud server is allocated only 1Mbps-5Mbps outbound bandwidth, high latency and data congestion can easily occur under high-concurrency scenarios.
Solution: Estimate bandwidth requirements based on traffic volume. For general video services, a minimum of 20Mbps is recommended. Enable elastic bandwidth or a metered plan to handle traffic bursts.
2. International Link Fluctuations
Although the Singapore node offers significant optimization for mainland China, international submarine cables occasionally experience congestion or failures, leading to unstable cross-border access speeds.
Recommendation: Use a cloud service with BGP international multi-link optimization. Combine this with CDN nodes for acceleration to reduce cross-border transmission pressure.
3. Network Congestion Caused by DDoS Attacks
Attacks like UDP floods and SYN floods can completely consume server bandwidth and connections, directly causing service freezes.
Recommendation: Choose a Singapore server with a built-in high-security IP address. Deploy traffic cleaning and firewall policies at the business layer to block malicious traffic.
III. Software and System Level
1. Unoptimized Operating System Kernel Parameters
Cloud servers often ship with default configurations, such as TCP connection limits and low file handle counts. These can easily become bottlenecks in high-concurrency scenarios.
Optimization: Adjust ulimit and sysctl parameters, such as net.core.somaxconn and fs.file-max. Use an optimized kernel version, such as BBR congestion control.
2. Improper web service and database configuration
Nginx's low default connection count leads to connection queuing when concurrency is high. Unoptimized ySQL caches and query threads can cause lock waits or even deadlocks.
Recommendation: Increase parameters such as the number of connections, buffers, and cache pools based on business stress testing results. Use read-write splitting and connection pooling to reduce database pressure.
3. Memory Leaks and Process Zombies
Some self-developed programs or third-party plug-ins have memory leaks. After running for a long time, they consume increasing amounts of memory, until the system freezes.
Recommendation: Regularly monitor memory usage and use top or htop to identify abnormal processes. Implement a scheduled restart strategy for long-running services and use daemons to ensure availability.
IV. Application Architecture Issues
1. Excessive Pressure on a Single-Server Architecture
Placing all services on a single Singapore cloud server will cause all resources to become fully utilized once traffic increases.
Optimization Method: Separate the front-end and back-end, using a CDN for static resources and a back-end API for dynamic requests. Introduce load balancing to distribute requests across multiple servers.
2. Lack of Caching Strategy
Frequent direct database access leads to high I/O load and slow response times.
Solution: Use Redis or Memcached to cache hot data. Use HTTP caching headers to reduce duplicate requests.
The cause of Singapore cloud server crashes is often not a single factor, but rather the result of multiple factors, including hardware, network, system, and application. For cross-border businesses, the low latency and stability of Singapore cloud servers remain significant advantages. However, to avoid crashes, resource planning, performance tuning, and security must be integrated into the overall operations and maintenance strategy from the outset. This ensures smooth operation even during peak traffic periods and enables stable business growth.