I’m a little confused on what kind of DO plan I need. For now, I want the lowest tier possible. It appears to me that the self install page and the DO 1 click install have some contradictory requirements.
On the self install page:
“The official release of Discourse 1.0, with 1 GB RAM minimum support”
OP is referring to the Digital Ocean “pre-configured” Discourse instance. That is locked at 2GB for political reasons because they don’t want people using swapfiles.
Just follow our official install guide, then you can select 1GB RAM droplet which works perfectly fine, and enable a swapfile, which will only really be touched during upgrades when there is crazy memory churn.
I only mentioned the 512 plan because I remember reading that it was ‘possible’ here on this forum. If Jeff states that it isn’t supported though, I’d imagine that while it works, it’s a terrible experience (using 512). So definitely follow his advice and go the 1GB route.
Don’t stress about having to use an installation guide, the fine folks here have made it incredibly easy to follow and get a discourse forum up and going.
VM providers don’t like people using swap, because it does terrible things to the system performance and confuses the memory management system (you’ve got two kernels both trying to manage RAM, and things get confused). So, as a VM provider, Digital Ocean want to avoid people using swap, so they require people to use a 2GB droplet. We, on the other hand, not being a VM provider, are more than happy to encourage people to use swap, because it does the job that is needed.
Does DO not want me using swapfiles due to infrastructure limitations? Or perhaps I would see possible detrimental performance issues on my Discourse instance if I enabled swapfiles?
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