Scaling Discourse

Product Support Self-hosting

AI-generated summary

A discussion on Scaling Discourse is underway. fuse is expecting a significant increase in traffic (10-100x) and wants to know how to scale their Discourse site, currently running on a 1GB RAM, 1vCPU, 40GB SSD instance.

fuse is considering upgrading to a $100 or $300 managed hosting plan and is unsure how Discourse scales with CPU, RAM, and storage.

pfaffman advises scaling the VM and running ./discourse-setup to adjust parameters for memory usage, suggesting 4GB of RAM should be sufficient.

Darkpixlz recommends 4-8GB of RAM and a few terabytes of SSD storage for a larger community, while Stephen agrees that 4GB will be ample, unless the community is upload-heavy, in which case using S3 or an S3-like clone is recommended.

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.

3

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

4

Wow, that was fast. Thank you both!

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.