Pros and cons of multiple standalone containers vs one for multiple Discourse installs?

Installation
1

There seems to be two options for multiple Discoure installs, multiple containers or one - what are the pros and cons of each, and perhaps, which do you think makes more sense for my needs (see below)?

My server is set up so that each site on it is in its own folder in the /home directory, e.g.:

/home/site1
/home/site2
/home/site3
etc

So I would prefer to install each Discourse forum in the same way:

/home/site1
/home/site2
/home/site3
/home/discourse1
/home/discourse2
etc

The server has 48GB of ram and my current Discourse install is set-up in this way. What would suit my needs best and what are the drawbacks if any?

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2

Are they all going to be serviced simultaneously? How much differentiation is going to exist in terms of plugins and other functionality?

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3

What do you mean by serviced? Upgraded? If so, yeah that would be cool to have as an option - though don’t mind doing individual upgrades if I had to.

They will probably run the same plug-ins (tags, accepted answer) as I generally don’t like to use plugins unless they are official or semi-official.

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4

@AstonJ what did you determine here since 2015 regarding standalone vs multisite installs? I am just considering moving all my sites to one DO droplet to save some money on hosting.

It seems to me that multisite could be fine for me given all my sites are private and don’t have so much activity.

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5

Standalone as it’s far more flexible :+1:

You should still be able to host multiple forums on a single droplet, have a look at my guide here if you need pointers: Set up Discourse on a server with existing Apache sites (just add additional backends for each forum in HAProxy).

6

Leaving my $0.02 here,

it really boils down to plugins. Multisite will make any plugins you install available to all the sites in the network whereas standalone sites will have their own unique subset.

The standalone sites will likely have higher system utilisation compared to a single multisite because each container will be running the same process. This doesn’t necessarily mean a performance impact in practice unless some sites experience exponentially higher traffic than others.

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