We are planning to use discourse as a webview in a part of our mobile application with more than 1 million users. We will direct users to the forum with notifications. This means 3-4K users instantly rushing to the forum. Considering the resources that Discourse consumes, what features should a server have to handle such traffic? We are using Digitalocean. Before buying a separate server for the forum, I want to get the opinion of you valuable forum users.
Thanks everyone.
Under normal circumstances, a 4GB / 2 vCPU server can easily run a 4 unicorns / 1 Sidekiq configuration using only half of the available memory.
That said, if Discourse is going to be an integral part off your application you should be running it in a high available mode, including multiple servers and data centers for resilience against failures. It also a good idea to have it auto scale accordingly to traffic. Those are all characteristics of our hosting at discourse.org.
Thank you for your explanatory answer. In this case, using hosting provided by discourse seems the most logical option.