OK - just wanted to update people on this in case you’re thinking about this. I’ve just had to upgrade from the basic 1GB droplet account on Digital Ocean because my disk and memory utilization was maxing out. I had to stop doing backups the past few weeks to keep the site going, and yesterday it froze under heavy load - so I upgrade to the $12/month account (2 GB Memory / 50 GB Disk / SFO3 - Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) x64).
Here is the traffic level the past week that required this upgrade. Obviously every forum will be a little different, but this gives you a general idea, from google analytics:
Thanks for the details on this! It’s kind of interesting that you have both memory and disk maxxed out at the same time. (I’d expect one to hit the limit first and force the upgrade.) It’s mildly surprising (to me) if filling the disk didn’t cause any harm or damage. But looking closely, you only filled the disk right at the end - previously perhaps at about 95%.
On the memory front, it’s notable that your disk i/o fell off at the same time you got the extra memory. That’s a clear sign that the machine was doing a lot of paging activity, which can indeed cause dramatic performance problems.
I see DO say that “used memory is calculated by subtracting free memory and memory used for caching from the total memory amount.” This is interesting, because people often say that their memory is 100% used, and there’s two very different things they might mean.
Thanks a lot Bcguy - good the know that $12 / mo can handle 1000 - 5000 users - that’s more than enough for the time-being. If more hardware resources are required, then showing 5000+ users stats could bring in some sort of financial funding by any means.
These stats is what I was looking for to judge how Discourse consumes resources.
Well, for me with a lot of smaller than 1000 - 5000 concurrent users (we don’t care how many there is per day) that wasn’t enough. That’s why I needed upgrade to 4GB/2vcpu droplet — and party because I needed bigger disk too.
Now I have too many cores and only a bit over 50 % of RAM is in use
Sure. I would use AWS or another solution for files. I don’t have global audience and actually that solution costs same or a bit more than increasing droplet at that level. And if/when one needs more RAM upgrading cost same with or without harddive space — it is only matter of ability to roll back (and if a forum gets smaller in the time passing and there is need to roll back… that’s not wanted situaton )
Question how much is much is almost as hard to answer than how much is enough.
I expect there might be a big difference between the number of ‘users’ Google Analytics see, vs the number, say, of ‘active users’ that the About page reports. I’d be interested to see the main chart from the Dashboard, which shows logged in, anonymous, and crawler activity.
For some forums, the daily traffic might be the same every day, for others it might be very peaky. Getting the hardware right-sized probably depends on the peaks, and your attitude to them. For one site, perhaps a hobby site, having slow performance during a peak might be fine. For another, perhaps a sports site, the whole point might be good performance during a peak.
)