# How big server do you need if your traffic is 1K user at the same time **URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-big-server-do-you-need-if-your-traffic-is-1k-user-at-the-same-time/131238 **Category:** Self-hosting **Tags:** hosting **Created:** [17 באוקטובר,‏ 2019,‏ 10:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-big-server-do-you-need-if-your-traffic-is-1k-user-at-the-same-time/131238 "2019-10-17T10:01:34Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 4
### Author: ![Remah](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/remah/32/70590_2.png) [@Remah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Remah) #### Post date: [19 באוקטובר,‏ 2019,‏ 1:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-big-server-do-you-need-if-your-traffic-is-1k-user-at-the-same-time/131238/4 "2019-10-19T01:04:20Z")
It doesn’t look like a mistake if the title and post both say 1 million users. Anyway, you should change the topic title from “1M user at the same time” to “1K user at the same time” so you might attract someone with a similar load who could tell you what they are actually using. By the way, what is a “RAW server” - did you mean “RAM”? Your assumption of a blog should be ignored because the forum should make higher demands on the server. But you still have to consider what users are actually doing: - anonymous vs logged-in - read vs post There are a lot of useful topics about capacity and scaling in the #hosting category. Here’s two guess-timates that may be in the same ball park: > [@With a server with 30GB of RAM How many users can I handle simultaneously](https://meta.discourse.org/t/with-a-server-with-30gb-of-ram-how-many-users-can-i-handle-simultaneously/35585/4): > > At that scale your server will be ample and over provisioned. A 4GB instance at Digital Ocean would probably be enough. There are tons of metrics that define load, it is very hard to estimate: Number of concurrent sessions Total number of posts in forum Anon vs Logged in breakdown (anon is WAY cheaper) Number of uniquely secured categories And so on… > [@Estimating required server capacity for a popular forum](https://meta.discourse.org/t/estimating-required-server-capacity-for-a-popular-forum/35574): > > I am planning to move a rather popular forum from SMF to Discourse. The site has been running very stable of a 1GB Rackspace cloud server, but now I am trying to figure out what would be the minimum requirements with this traffic for running Discourse at Digital Ocean. Old stats in Finnish: [Tappara.co](http://tappara.info/index.php?action=stats) Members: 1500, with 100 being super active Concurrent sessions: Can peak to 500-800 users online Traffic: Potential for 100k page views per 24h Posts: Thousands per month This is a fan forum … But above those levels, there is this site that was running on 8 CPUs and 16GB RAM: > [@1,000,000 pageviews in 2 weeks...! Why? Because Discourse. rocket](https://meta.discourse.org/t/1-000-000-pageviews-in-2-weeks-why-because-discourse/68891): > > Just [15 days ago](https://john.do/bitcoin-pub/) I shared a new [Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency community site](http://thebitcoin.pub/) that my brother was putting together and it’s been an insane 15 days. The first day that the site was live it saw a grand total of 796 pageviews – not bad, not bad, right? I was impressed but I wasn’t even remotely prepared for what was to come. You see, the next day the site didn’t see double the number of pageviews or even triple. It didn’t see 5 or even 10X. The very next day the community site clocked in nearly 60,00… What service level(s) are you aiming at? This post/topic is my favorite because it compares Discourse with traditional (i.e. LAMP-based) forums: > [@Performance, Scaling, and HA requirements](https://meta.discourse.org/t/performance-scaling-and-ha-requirements/60098/8): > > Number of posts made is about the least interesting metric, even more so over such a long time period. Page views is far, far more relevant for determining needed resources. It can be a bit tricky to compare the requests and traffic patterns of a “traditional” mostly-server-generated forum to a Discourse forum, because Discourse is very API-driven, so we often serve multiple HTTP hits per “page view”, but we tend to service each HTTP request a lot quicker, so the forum appears to be a lot more… Don’t forget that if you are cloud hosting then the size of the database becomes more relevant because you might have to spend more money to expand limited storage. FYI, here’s some further info which might be relevant to your decision-making options: - You can simulate capacity on a Discourse site and see what happens: [https://meta.discourse.org/t/simulate-real-discourse-traffic/86818?u=remah](https://meta.discourse.org/t/simulate-real-discourse-traffic/86818) - If you’re looking at costs then cloud servers are a lot more expensive than bare-metal servers: > [@The Discourse Servers](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-discourse-servers/5898/3): > > Performance wise there is no comparison; building your own modern servers is crazy fast compared to what you’ll get “in the cloud”. One brand new top-of-the-line server costs about as much as two months of EC2 web application hosting – [Building Servers for Fun and Prof… OK, Maybe Just for Fun](https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/building-servers-for-fun-and-prof-ok-maybe-just-for-fun.html) Unless you pay many thousands of dollars per month. Our hosting bill at [he.net](http://he.net) is $600/month for the record. That includes “unlimited” 100 Mbps on a gigabit ethernet port, 15 amps, and a full 42U loc… - Maybe you need to use a specific cloud host. This forum was moved to cloud hosting to cater for such requirements. > [@Meta is moving to the Cloud cloud\_with\_lightning](https://meta.discourse.org/t/meta-is-moving-to-the-cloud-cloud-with-lightning/72819/7): > > Perhaps , some high end customers require hosting on AWS cause they need to be in Europe or China, nothing is changing for our hosted customers. I do want to do a blog post about how much faster and more predictable our hosting is than AWS at some point P.S. I hope that there will be a topic to help people with some general guidelines and real-world examples. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-big-server-do-you-need-if-your-traffic-is-1k-user-at-the-same-time/131238)._