Fast Updates ... with adequate hardware

Praise
1

I had a site running in beta for a while on a 1CPU/1MB hosted VM. The plan was to update to a more performant platform after the initial configs and consmetics. While always slow, expectedly, recent updates forced a hardware upgrade. Docker Manager failed to update several times. Discourse failed to upgrade several times after that.

I upgraded the hardware to 2CPU/4GB today. Pages are spiffy. Updates went very quickly.

This is a big Thanks to the Discourse team for ongoing maintenance and improvements - which ensure updates are as painless as possible.

This is also a big warning to other admins. We can’t run this on older hardware anymore. Old hardware leads to weird issues that no one here can debug. If your system is behaving weirdly, upgrade the hardware, even temporarily, see if the problems go away. Downgrade if required for budgeting. But at least you’ll know where issues are, and are not.

HTH

8 Likes
2

Possibly if you didn’t have swap space turned on (discouraged by most providers due to performance issues and hardware wear-out), I could definitely imagine your system going over the 1GB limit and getting various OOM (Out of Memory) crashes.

I did not experience crashes when I relied on swap space, but I also recently upgraded to larger RAM allocation / no swap and have seen a similarly dramatic performance improvement, especially during rebuilds.