# Why does Discourse need 1 GB of RAM?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-does-discourse-need-1-gb-of-ram/12301>\
**Category:** Self-hosting\
**Tags:** hosting\
**Created:** [30.Январь.2014 19:42:16 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-does-discourse-need-1-gb-of-ram/12301 "2014-01-30T19:42:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [31.Январь.2014 23:39:33 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-does-discourse-need-1-gb-of-ram/12301/7 "2014-01-31T23:39:33Z")

</div>

I would not use blog entries from 4 years ago as representative of the way things are today in the world of programming and technology.

Memory requirements will be a bit higher on some stacks than others. Remember that Discourse, as we say many times on [http://www.discourse.org](http://www.discourse.org) **is built for the next decade of the Internet**. We’re 1 year into a 10 year plan. We want to make decisions that might seem aggressive now, but are still smart 5 years from now. Maybe even prescient!

That said, memory is cheap and getting cheaper every day. For example [in 2009 our Stack Overflow web tier servers](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/new-stack-overflow-server-glamour-shots/) had 8GB RAM. The ones we [built for Discourse in late 2012](http://blog.discourse.org/2013/04/the-discourse-servers/) had **32GB** RAM (and dual 512gb SSDs). That is a 4x increase in 4 years.

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-does-discourse-need-1-gb-of-ram/12301)._