Hello there! So, I got myself a little Digital Ocean account & started a droplet by signing up through the “One-Click Discourse” install using the Ubuntu option.
I got my credentials, logged in to the admin account, and even before completing the 13 initial Discourse configuration questions, the load times started being atrocious, and now, I’ve created a couple of topics, but haven’t so much as written a single post and am the only person visiting the site, but I’m randomly getting really long load times (some over 2,000 ms), and 502 bad gateway & 504 gateway timeout errors while poking around the site doing simple things, like clicking on categories off the main page.
I’ve tried to get help from digital ocean a couple of times, stating that this is a fresh install with their installation script, but they keep telling me that they do not support software in any which way whatsoever - the only thing they have done is to see that my memory usage (1GB) is running high, and they suggested I stop running some things I may have installed (I have installed none).
Is this a case of the $5 droplet one-click install just not being sufficient for a small Discourse server? From what I’ve been reading, 1GB should be plenty until I get a few dozen or so active users… or does Digital Ocean bundle in a bunch of bloatware in their one-click installs that prevent their own implementations from running, and they’re just oblivious to it?
I guess more important than a reason, what would people suggest be my solution? Upgrade to their $10 vm? Create a new vanilla droplet and install Discourse myself? Or slog around the server settings to see how I can lower memory usage? (My Unix skills are around 15 years out of date but if I have to I can poke things with sticks and eventually probably get rid of some things without breaking my new forum).
Tks in advance for any suggestions I may receive!
