aws ec2 and gcp e2 instances constantly become unresponsive

Question

I've deployed a Django app on AWS-ec2-micro instance and a React app on GCP-e2-micro instance before, but I encountered almost the exact same problem: Server will randomly become unresponsive and unreachable while doing some heavy I/O operations. It happens almost all the time if I try to install some large packages such as tesseract, but it sometimes freezes even when I'm just trying to run a react app using npm start. I've looked at the monitoring and they all have one thing in common: super high CPU usage. Especially after the server becomes unreachable, the CPU meters continue to rise. AWS-ec2 usually will reach almost 100% while GCP-e2 instance will reach beyond 100% to something like 140%. At a certain time, the CPU usage will become stabilized at about 50%, but the server is still unreachable using SSH.

The server sometimes recovers itself after hours of being unreachable, but usually, it ends up having to force stop and restart the server. This will cause the public ipv4 to change which I really don't like, so I want to find out why my server is constantly unresponsive.

Here is what I've installed on my server:

• ssh-server
• vscode-server

And then on GCP-e2, I've also installed npm, react and some UI packages. A simple react app should not have such a high I/O operation that will directly makes the server unresponsive, so I begin to think if I have something configured wrong, but I have no clue what that will be. Please help me. Thank you!

Answer 1

I had the same issue, I used the free tier t2.micro and it was not keeping up with all the processes that needed to be handled when executing npx create-react-app react-webapp. I had to reboot it at least 2 times to be able to ssh into it again.

Upgrading the instance type to c5a.large solved the problem, hope this helps.