Upon migrating my blog to a Google Cloud Compute Engine VM (this very blog) I had a strange issue where it would freeze and become unresponsive. Only “Resetting” the VM would bring the blog back.

The findings were so interesting I thought I would share them.

Issue

It’s worth noting what the instance is (and importantly what resources it has been allocated) as it probably would not be an issue with a larger (and more expensive) instance. As of writing the instance is set to a “e2-micro” instance located in “us-central1”. The reason for this is you get one free instance in this region when using Google Cloud.