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

Product Support

AI-generated summary

Determining when a $5 Digital Ocean droplet is running into performance issues can be challenging. According to joa, the official install instructions recommend 1 GB RAM for small communities and 2 GB RAM for larger ones, but defining small and large communities is difficult.

joa suggests looking for metrics to scale up the droplet, and Falco recommends monitoring response time, specifically topic page load times exceeding 200ms. When this occurs, it’s essential to investigate machine resources and identify the bottleneck to determine if scaling up is necessary.

1

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

Timelord responded:

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?

2

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.