Hosting necessary for large forums

Installation Hosting
1

I was hoping to get some advice from the community here about hosting configuration for my forum which I am in the process of migrating to Discourse. We have been running since 2000 and have migrated 1.15 million topics, 30 million posts, and 300,000 user accounts. Between our desktop, mobile web, and iOS/Google Play apps we did roughly 15 million page/screen views a month.

We have setup a CPU-optimized droplet with 200 GB SSD,16 GB Ram, & 8 CPUs. I’m curious if this is sufficient or we need to consider a larger droplet.

2 Likes
2

I’d recommend using one of those new faster-cpu droplets that they just introduced.

I don’t know that it won’t be enough, but I’ll be curious if it is as well.

4 Likes
3

Very hard to know… you need to monitor it carefully for multiple weeks after launch and assess.

Keep in mind background tasks are likely to be very busy during your first few weeks while various caches get populated.

4 Likes
4

Good to know. Thanks for the help. This migration has been a headache, but we are nearly there. Hopefully our users appreciate being on this awesome new platform.

2 Likes
5

Most will, but they won’t say anything.

A bunch of them will hate it. They’ll let you know! :wink

5 Likes
6

I suspect that you might need more memory for your database. It might be worth to move to a multi container setup so at least your web layer is more scalable.

My advice: resize your server to something (much) larger first, so all the after-migration jobs have room to run, and your users will not have a negative experience. Like Jay said, they will be vocal, and toxicity can kill your community, especially when performance is indeed bad.

Then keep an eye on things and see if you can scale down after a while. Just don’t resize your disk, so you always keep the option to revert and scale down again.

5 Likes