How do I know when my 5$ Digital Ocean droplet is running into performance issues?

[joa (Joachim)]

The official install instructions say

• The default of 1 GB RAM works fine for small Discourse communities. We recommend 2 GB RAM for larger communities.

Digital Ocean recommends at least 2 GB of ram, presumably because they would prefer the Droplets not to use swap.

Apparently, how to distinguish small and large communities for the purpose of deciding between 1GB and 2GB is difficult. When asked

@Dheeraj_Kumar

how much registered users and views per day it can handle

Timelord responded:

@Timelord

That is almost impossible to say, as it really depends on how active the users are. Posts per minute, average read time, how many images are posted, read/etc.

So, now I’m wondering: How do I notice I should scale up my Droplet? What metrics should I look for? Should I check something on the Digital Ocean control panel or on Discourse itself?

[Falco]

The standard issue for web applications is response time.

If topic pages start taking too long to respond, like more than 200ms, you will want to check you machine resources and investigate the bottleneck.