# Optimizing the number of Unicorns and buffer size

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-the-number-of-unicorns-and-buffer-size/51514
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** server-resources
**Created:** [13 Outubro , 2016 19:17 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-the-number-of-unicorns-and-buffer-size/51514 "2016-10-13T19:17:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 3

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### Author: ![ljpp](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/ljpp/32/96506_2.png) [@ljpp](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ljpp)
#### Post date: [16 Fevereiro , 2017 06:38 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-the-number-of-unicorns-and-buffer-size/51514/3 "2017-02-16T06:38:33Z")

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Found the limits of our setup yesterday, with about 400+ concurrent sessions and many of them being logged in, actively polling and chatting. The day before we delivered 138k page views without a hitch.

The bottleneck was the number of unicorns (8). We only reached about 35% CPU loads and there were 2GBs of free RAM with these settings. I changed to 10 unicorns, after which we had no more hiccups and served a peak of 440 sessions, and got CPU loads closer to 50%.

But then it was getting late and things cooled down and I wasn’t able to do any more live performance testing with max load.

Anyway, with UpClouds 6-core / 8GB RAM plan (or similar) I would say that 10 unicorns is better than 8. I’ll be looking at the amount of free RAM and and lets see if even 11-12 would be feasible. Ping @mpalmer?

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