Services Won't Start

First steps

# See which services are down
sp status

# Check logs for the failing service
sp logs mautic --tail 200
sp logs n8n --tail 200

# Try restarting
sp restart mautic

Out of memory (OOM)

If a container is being killed by the OS (OOM Killer), you will see messages likeKilled or Out of memory in the logs. Solutions:

• Upgrade your VPS to a higher RAM tier
• Reduce Mautic's cron frequency to process fewer contacts at a time
• Disable unused services with sp remove <service> --keep-data

# Check current memory usage
free -h
docker stats --no-stream

Database connection refused

If Mautic shows a database error:

# Check if MySQL container is running
sp status

# Restart the database
sp restart mysql

If MySQL keeps crashing, check its logs for InnoDB errors or disk-full conditions:

sp logs mysql --tail 100

Mautic shows 503 error

This usually means the PHP-FPM process inside Mautic crashed. Restart Mautic:

sp restart mautic

If the 503 persists after restart, check Mautic logs for PHP fatal errors.

n8n won't start after update

Check if PostgreSQL is running:

sp status
sp restart postgres
sp restart n8n

Sometimes n8n needs a database migration after an update. Check n8n logs for migration errors and allow a few minutes for the migration to complete on first start.

Disk full

df -h

If disk usage is above 90%, free space by removing old Docker logs and images, then runsp export to check that backups are not accumulating on the server:

docker system prune -f
ls -lh ~/sp-backups/