Scaling Discourse

Installation Hosting
1

I’m in the midst of an pretty interesting conversation about content on my discourse site that may change traffic significantly.

I’m presently on a 1GB RAM, 1vCPU, 40GB SSD instance.

Its very small community today- let’s say 30 active members.
Adding this particular content may grow the site to 300-3000 members (10-100x).

We’re averaging over 40k pageviews now, and I have looked at the $100 and $300 managed hosting plans as possible options.

I may not be searching for the right things in meta/documentation- how does discourse scale with CPU/RAM/storage?

Can discourse leverage 2-4 vCPUs and 8-16GB RAM?

Any and all insight appreciated.

Thank you!

2

Sure. Just scale your VM and then run

  ./discourse-setup

to have it adjust the parameters for the memory usage. You can scale to whatever you want. Whether you scale to 2 or 4GB for more is up to you, but I’d guess that 4GB will be enough.

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3

You probably need about 4-8gb for a larger community, and a lot more SSD storage, probably a few terabytes.

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4

Wow, that was fast. Thank you both!

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5

My response was just a rough estimate. The more the better really.

6

4GB will be ample.

Your storage needs won’t explode unless you expect to be upload-heavy. In which case don’t scale up the directly-attached storage beyond what the 4GB offers as standard ($$$) instead look at implementing S3 or one of the S3-like clones which are out there.

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