How much of a performance booster is 2GB vs 1GB RAM?

hosting
1

I noticed that at leastr some of the pages in my (newly installed) discourse forum are quite slow to load:

Currently I’m on a 1GB digital ocean droplet and have a WP site on the same droplet, but with no traffic yet, so I am wondering whether upgrading to 2GB RAM would noticeably improve anything?

2

Not much unless you have memory pressure. Memory pressure would come from a large database or many active simultaneous users.

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3

This means you have PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, nginx/Apache as reverse proxy and Wordpress, possibly with plugins, on a 1 GB droplet together with Discourse? Or is this all shared or provided by other droplets?

If everything is hosted on a single System, you should really check your memory usage under some load.

4

Note, that mini profiler time is showing 14 reqs took 2.5 secs, if you click it expands to add individual reqs

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Yes, all that on one droplet together with discourse. So here is my memory check.

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            992         665          88          47         238         116
Swap:          2047         501        1546

And that is without any load (meaning users/page views).
I guess that means I do have some “memory pressure”, right?

6

Maybe, maybe not. Since you’ve got a reasonable amount of memory available and used by cache, things aren’t as dire as they might appear. Without traffic, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether you’ll have problems. Throw some requests at the system using a load tester, and see what happens. I wrote something recently on how to tune for memory usage and the metrics to look at, which will give you a much better idea of how swamped your system is than just looking at free.

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This question has unintentionally resurfaced in another topic and, after some more testing, the answer there is pretty clear: for running Wordpress and Discourse on the same server, 1GB is not enough:

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