My self hosted forum ( https://intfiction.org/ ) has the past couple of weeks started getting very slow, and it frequently has 502 and 503 errors. I’m on the stable branch, version 2026.1.5. Searching for those errors here hasn’t uncovered any likely causes: the forum builds and launches fine the …

Just noticed some more while watching top: postgres: 15/main: discourse discourse [local] idle used up to 90% CPU, and it’s doing so for over a minute. Edit: the forum was doing its daily backup, so I think that’s the cause of this one. I’m running the mail receiver on this server, and it seems t…

Those waves of incoming spam email are not going to help. But I agree - add RAM if you can. Double it.

Self hosted forum has frequent 502 and 503 errors

Support Self-hosting

NateDhaliwal (Nate Dhaliwal) July 5, 2026, 4:05am 2

I would suggest upping the RAM a bit more first, that could help.

Topic		Replies	Views
Discourse site with very large database gives error 502 frequently Support	10	1471	February 19, 2017
Forum giving 502 Bad Gateway Error Self-hosting	7	887	November 3, 2020
502 Bad Gateway for only two Topics Self-hosting arm	19	2035	November 17, 2022
How to resolve HTTP 502 error? Support	12	1148	March 3, 2019
Forum slowing to a crawl with 504s Support	5	1576	February 26, 2016

Self hosted forum has frequent 502 and 503 errors

Related topics