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[Stephen]

@Crius

I’ll keep in mind your suggestion of 2xcores for workers and 25% of the reserved memory for the db shared buffers.

this is what discourse-setup does:

# db_shared_buffers: 128MB for 1GB, 256MB for 2GB, or 256MB * GB, max 4096MB
# UNICORN_WORKERS: 2 * GB for 2GB or less, or 2 * CPU, max 8

‘max’ can be taken with a pinch of salt there, particularly big communities will see benefits beyond those numbers.

So yes, in your case it should have specified the maximums of 8 workers and 4096MB. If you reduce the workers and shared buffers available to Discourse then it will tap out before all of the resources on the VM are consumed.

This post from @mpalmer is still good guidance:

Optimizing the number of Unicorns and buffer size

Increasing the number of unicorn workers to suit your CPU and RAM capacity is perfectly reasonable. The “two unicorns per core” guideline is a starting figure. CPUs differ (wildly) in their performance, and VPSes make that even more complicated (because you can never tell who else is on the box and what they’re doing with the CPU), so you start conservative, and if you find that you’re running out of unicorns before you’re running out of CPU and RAM, then you just keep increasing the unicorns. …