Self-hosters: Rebuild Discourse to reduce RAM usage

[tgxworld (Alan Tan)]

We’ve improved how Discourse shares memory between the processes running inside its container, reducing the amount of RAM it needs.

Here’s an example from one of our internal containers. Before the change, memory usage reached around 1.9 GB. After deploying the improvement, it has generally stayed around the baseline of 1.3 GB.

The improvement is available on main and the 2026.9, 2026.8, and 2026.7 release branches.

Savings will vary between sites. Once you’ve rebuilt, let us know how your RAM usage changes!

[merefield (Robert)]

This was much needed, thank you!

[Editor0732]

11.8G → 10.5G

[Fahriar_Akash]

That’s cool.
Will be great for VPS with less ram.

[NateDhaliwal]

Unfortunately I don’t think 1GB RAM is still viable these days .

[fearlessfrog]

Seems a little better - thanks!

[scavin]

After rebuilding my Discourse container, Pitchfork memory usage dropped from about 2.7–2.8 GB to 2.3–2.45 GB, a reduction of roughly 15% (~400 MB), and remained stable after five days.

The chart was generated with AI based on my monitoring data.