Excessive consumption of memory due to precompiling assets

[Ed_S]

It’s always advisable to have swap. It’s a very good idea to enable the kernel to overcommit. It can substantially reduce your peak memory needs.

I’d sort out those two things and then try again. For overcommit, see

MKJ's Opinionated Discourse Deployment Configuration

I have been running a Discourse forum with a substantial amount of content and plenty of images over the past few years. Maker Forums has over 100GB of images and over 400,000 posts, of which a substantial amount was imported, primarily from Google+, and the rest was created on the site. This post describes elements of how I eventually configured Maker Forums and, later, a few other Discourse instances. This is what I wish I knew when I got started, and which I’ve used to help others avoid some …

In terms of diagnosis, it might be helpful to check dmesg for OOM events, which you could do afterwards, and also to run vmstat at the time of the stall.

vmstat 5 5

Here’s my general diagnostic advice:

@Ed_S

BTW if something is not working with no obvious evidence as to why, and especially if you suspect memory shortage, it’s worth checking for the out-of-memory killer, also known as the OOM-killer. I recommend

dmesg|egrep -i "memory|oom|kill"

Edit: for convenience I’ll add that to my list of standard instant diagnostics:

cat /etc/lsb-release
uptime
df -h /
free
vmstat 5 5
dmesg|egrep -i "memory|oom|kill"
ps auxrc