# Does the server need 2GB of RAM? **URL:** \ **Category:** Self-hosting\ **Tags:** hosting\ **Created:** [2015 年1 月 3 日 09:45 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/does-the-server-need-2gb-of-ram/23630 "2015-01-03T09:45:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 16
作者： ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\ 发布日期： [2015 年7 月 22 日 09:24 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/does-the-server-need-2gb-of-ram/23630/16 "2015-07-22T09:24:50Z")
They just came of age at very different times. PHP happened around the time 128mb of memory was considered reasonable for a server, and it was designed to work on the lowest-spec boxes out there as a simple “Personal Home Page”, hence “PHP”. It wasn’t even a programming language, really. A lot of it ([some say all of it](http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)) was really quite accidental. But _always_ designed to work on the lowest spec boxes out there due to its simple roots and was in wide use in the USA and Europe even in 1999. Ruby was more of a programmers’ programming language, designed to fold in all the best aspects of existing languages like Perl, Python, Lisp, etc. It was viewed as wildly experimental until around 2004 when it finally became popular in the US. So it demands more resources as it is more forward thinking. Ruby itself just reached version 2.0 not that long ago, for example. The minimum spec for a Discourse site is 1GB RAM, dual core VPS, which is ~~$10/month~~ $5/month on Digital Ocean. You can run a good sized forum on that. You could probably run a similar PHP based forum for $2-3/month on ultra low cost shared tenant hosting. Whether those are onerous numbers depends on your budget and needs, I suppose – if you are in the third world it would be tough to run Discourse. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/does-the-server-need-2gb-of-ram/23630)._