3G RAM + 1G Partition Swap - is it enough?

[Ed_S]

The official minimum supported is 1G RAM + 2G swap - and that is enough, if you have a pretty small forum. Although, every update gets just a little bigger so I expect there will come a time when it’s not enough.

For having the forum work correctly and not crash, the sum total of RAM and swap is the important figure.

For having the forum responsive and not be too slow, more RAM is preferred. So, if 1G RAM + 2G swap is enough, then 3G RAM + 1G swap will be enough, and might have better performance.

I have two forums, both quite small, one runs on 1+2 and the other on 2+2.

Last year I wrote this:

@Ed_S

By way of calibration, I have two small forums:

Smaller forum runs with 10G used of a 19G disk, backups are 200M each, 2000 posts in 200 topics, 30 users. That’s a little under 2 years of activity.

Larger forum runs with 16G used of a 25G disk, backups are 700M each, 8000 posts in 1000 topics, 300 users. That’s a little over 2 years of activity.

Edit: if you have the disk space to add swap, do it - there’s no good reason not to, and it might be needed. The free command will tell you how much is in use, the vmstat command can give you a running commentary. But average use is not interesting - it’s peak use that’s interesting.