# How much is Discourse affected by a faster CPU?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-much-is-discourse-affected-by-a-faster-cpu/58407
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** hosting
**Created:** [05.Март.2017 11:11:37 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-much-is-discourse-affected-by-a-faster-cpu/58407 "2017-03-05T11:11:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 9

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![mpalmer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mpalmer/32/45740_2.png) [@mpalmer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mpalmer)
#### Post date: [05.Март.2017 22:44:06 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-much-is-discourse-affected-by-a-faster-cpu/58407/9 "2017-03-05T22:44:06Z")

</div>

> [@tophee](#):
>
> Where exactly does “have enough memory” start? When you don’t have any swapping at all going on?

Yes, swap activity is the best baseline measure, as in “if you see consistent swap activity, you _definitely_ don’t have enough memory”. You can get a bit more performance by ensuring you also have enough memory to store the entire working set of disk pages in memory (I’ve [talked about this before](https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-the-number-of-unicorns-and-buffer-size/51514/5), specifically the paragraph that starts, “As far as disk cache goes”), but definitely if you’re swapping, your performance is going to be viciously destroyed.

BTW, for anyone comparing the costs and thinking, “OMFG that’s not worth it”, consider that the colocated server is _significantly_ more powerful than the droplet (8x RAM, etc). The closest equivalent droplet is $160/month, so if you were replacing that droplet size with a colo box you’d make your money back in about five months… sure, time is money, etc etc, but stable hardware doesn’t take that much time to keep an eye on.

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-much-is-discourse-affected-by-a-faster-cpu/58407)._