I’ve just done a bunch of upgrades and decided the easiest way to solve the memory errors was just to double the swap to 4GB. The down-side is that on a 1GB droplet there is only 25GB of SSD, so losing 4 of it to swap is a significant amount of space, and it’s already a bit tight with only 25 GB. S…

Can I strongly suggest that the installation script should also set the two kernel tunables which affect the memory handling? It would be good to know that everyone who apparently has a problem does at least have a starting point of a good kernel setup. [image] MKJ's Opinionated Discourse Deploy…

This seems like a sane idea to me. I can’t imagine where THP are possibly valuable on a dedicated discourse instance, and overcommit can help avoid OOM. Might consider offering to do each of these separately, setting them as the default response, with the non-default option to opt out? Also, the s…

At the risk of diluting the important message about kernel tunables, there’s a second consideration: the present script only creates swap on a low-RAM machine. I think that’s a mistake, both because swap is still useful in maximising the usefullness of RAM, but more importantly because it will caus…

[image] Ed S: Can I strongly suggest that the installation script should also set the two kernel tunables which affect the memory handling? I’m not who decides, and I set these on machines I set up, but this is a shell script that gets run by (mostly) everyone who installs Discourse. It needs…

[image] Jay Pfaffman: I wrote discourse-setup and I find making changes to it a bit scary. Thank you! And yes, fully understood, I’d feel the same way. It does need careful thought and testing, for sure. And that would be on at least a couple of hosting provider’s cheap machines, and on Pi …

[image] Ed S: But it grieves me a lot not to know whether these reports include or do not include the overcommit tweak. I’m pretty sure we know from previous discussions that overcommit makes a difference. Hmm. Yeah. I wish I had thought to check on that on the ones I just tweaked. [image…

[image] Ed S: The setup should create swap in all cases (unless there’s already enough.) I disagree. Swap is not a universal good. It used to be important for making VM code more even when not swapping in certain circumstances, but VM algorithms have changed. [image] Jay Pfaffman: A rule…

I’m pretty sure that the only disadvantage of “too much swap” is to use up more disk space than absolutely necessary. It’s one reason it would be preferable to have several modest-sized swapfiles - one can swapoff and remove them progressively, if there’s a need to recover the disk space. Also, I t…

Swapping is slow enough that I would not take “barely out of room now” as a reason to add more than 1GB to the default suggestion at this point. Each 1GB is a lot of swap, as experienced on a dedicated Discourse instance. Yes, by default Linux uses swap in priority order, and it’s possible to use t…

Should we increase the default swap space to 3GB or 4GB?

Product Support Self-hosting

Falco (Falco) February 6, 2024, 2:39am 2

If that solves the problem I’m all up for it.

Topic		Replies	Views
3G RAM + 1G Partition Swap - is it enough? Self-hosting server-resources	16	1916	June 4, 2022
Discourse Swap Memory (1GB Warning) Product Support server-resources	7	3546	April 29, 2021
Is 1GB RAM enough for both WordPress and Discourse? Self-hosting server-resources	21	5032	March 3, 2017
Discourse-doctor nagging about swap creation Self-hosting hosting	3	160	September 19, 2025
Switches for resource constrained VPS? Self-hosting	6	318	September 30, 2025

Should we increase the default swap space to 3GB or 4GB?

Related topics