Which Issue Tracker is suitable for a VPS?

Question

I'm hosting my application on a Linode, but is hosted on a Tomcat instance, which uses most of the RAM. I also have Apache installed, so I can front Mercurial, and I believe a bug tracker is a must, however I can't decide on which is best, given scarce resources. JIRA seems to be out of the question, so I've been deciding on either

• Trac
• Mantis
• Redmine

I like Trac because I have already got Apache serving Python, Redmine for the features and Mantis because I feel it's the most lightweight of the three, however lacking in the feature department, compared with the other two, so, what do you recommend, given the situation?

Answer 1

Mantis is quite lightweight and works well on small VPSs. I would expect it to fit nicely on a 512M slice, and perhaps on an even smaller one, depending on your traffic.

I see that you believe it to be less featured that Redmine and Trac . That's another discussion, but the question is - does it do enough for your needs? If it does, you have a winner.

Answer 2

I have a VPS and Redmine.

We used to have a 1 gig RAM, single v-core, 40GB disk VPS running Centos 5.5 (x64). It struggled with performance issues with Redmine under heavy use (since we also have our e-commerce websites running on the same box). We only have two developers that access redmine at a time, but we have enough apps that there were times that our FTP and Redmine and SVN access was slowing down the server and affecting our e-commerce customers (bad!).

We upgraded to a 2 gig RAM, two v-core, 80GB disk VPS. Chances are if we ever hire contractor software dev's and they use our Redmine and SVN we would probably re-size our slice to a 4 gig RAM, four v-core VPS. Still experimenting to see if 2 gig and two vcores is enough for us now. Basically you should be spending at least $50-$100 a month on your server for it to have enough to run redmine.

Answer 3

(Whats a VPS?)

That aside, do you really need to maintain your own bug tracking installation? We have moved our system from an inhouse Bugzilla to Assembla (www.assembla.com) and it is great! I have a lot more time to do my actual job these days instead of dealing with multi-tool integration problems. For the record I think Trac is part of Assembla's integration. We are a small organization so the Assembla fees are pretty light, I think we're up to maybe $25/mo (including all of our SVN hosting) so that's about 10 minutes of my time (wink;) and I was easily spending 1/2 day a month on tools issues. You'd have to scope it out to see if their offering makes sense for your organization. (BTW I don't work for Assembla!)

My apologies to give you a non-technical answer to your technical question.