WaitroseCarpark is considering upgrading their $10/month Digital Ocean droplet due to 75% memory utilization. They shared a screenshot of their usage over the last 24 hours, but codinghorror suggested that a longer period, such as a week, would be more representative.
After sharing the 7-day usage graph, pfaffman and Dannii reassured WaitroseCarpark that 75% memory utilization is not a problem, as Linux uses available memory and the swap is not highly active. Unless performance issues are experienced, upgrading is not necessary.
I’d like to know whether the usage of my droplet instance merits an upgrade. I’m currently running the $10pm service but due to a stalled upgrade which required a manual restart due to running out of memory I’m thinking it’s due as I’m currently at roughly 75% utilisation.
I have been unable to find any guidance on when i should consider upgrading, but 75% sounds a little too high to me.
OK here are the graphs for the last 7 days. Yes, it’s a 2GB droplet. I tried the rake db command and it’s listed my database but I’m not sure how to see the total size? It can’t be that big, site is only a few months old.
Linux will use as much memory as is available. High memory usage isn’t a problem. As long as the swap isn’t highly active, which can be seen by your Disk IO, then you’re fine. Only if it’s thrashing swap constantly should you be looking at increasing your memory.
