Ask HN: What's necessary re: server RAM?
I'm signing up for Slicehost right now because I want more freedom with my server. Storage and bandwidth I don't care about much, because I don't do very much transfer-heavy work on my own sites, but how do I judge how effective their RAM offerings are? How much memory does a single hit to a site take? How many concurrent threads can be run with, say, 256MB of RAM versus a full GB? I don't recall ever reading about this before (other than "X site goes down thanks to Digg effect) and I was wondering if anybody had advice about figuring out which would best work.
You may want to also take a look at http://www.linode.com, they give more ram, for the same price, and have a pretty slick, albeit not as pretty control area.
I am running a rails app with 100,000 pages views/month with a 86MB slice(not at slicehost though) with <2sec response times. The pages are pretty heavy dynamic pages.
It completely depends on your application/stack. Something with static content and simple dynamic pages could scream at 256MB, or even less. Something with other RAM-eating frameworks and code might run best with GB+.
A nice thing with Slicehost is you can start with the smallest, and then if it seems you need more RAM, can restart the same image on a bigger slice.
You will know if you need more RAM by watching your busy server with 'top' over time, and among other things, ensuring that it never begins swapping.
Almost any app can benefit from more RAM, especially if you use various levels of caching effectively (from the automatic linux disk cache through framework-level fragment- or page- caching to HTTP-server/proxy caching).
So when you're sure things work OK, but then want to make them snappy, throwing RAM at the problem (with a little engineering to use it wisely) is usually a good idea.
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