Question

Analysing the graphs from my droplet..

Posted January 8, 2016 3.8k views
WordPress DigitalOcean Billing

Hello im currently on the 2gb Droplet running my wordpress based website, and i have been looking at the graphs to show the system usages etc…

My droplet is pretty low on all the graphs, especially CPU usage.

Over the 30 day period, apart from one day(which peaked at 35%) the avg. cpu usage is less than 10%, so im thinking that i would be fine to drop to the 1gb droplet.

I realise that its better to have performance ‘in the bag’, but currently it seems that im 'under using’ my droplets performance.

Whats the opinion of whats best to do?

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1 answer
ryanpq January 8, 2016

The primary concern with LAMP/WordPress sites is the memory usage rather than the CPU. Since droplets do not have swap space by default, if the MySQL process uses up the available memory it can crash.

Currently the graphs do not include memory usage but you can track this yourself. The command free -m will output your current used/available memory. If you wanted to you could set up a cron job to run the following:

date >> /some/directory/memory.log
free -m >> /some/directory/memory.log

Each time this command runs it will append the output to what was previously there starting with the current timestamp and then including the memory use details.

I would recommend monitoring memory use for a couple days at least before deciding whether to scale down your droplet. In most cases a 1GB droplet will support WordPress well.

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  • andy96e424d292b January 8, 2016

    Thats a very valid point i had forgot to check. Had forgotten to consider that.

    I will do that and then give it a week and then maybe make a decision from there.

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    • hunky January 8, 2016 
      Whats the opinion of whats best to do?

      Frankly speaking, the real fun of Digital Ocean of being in the cloud.. You can do things almost on fly and few certain cases, with just couple of mouse clicks. So why dont you do a little trial and error :P

      For personal blog, unless you have high visitor count (more than 10k per day), 1GB should be good enough.

      You can even go lower with proper tuning, caching and offloading with CDN.

      Wordpress it self is not that resource hungry, mind you its the plugs-in, which are sometime really demanding on hardware.

      Thanks.

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      • andy96e424d292b January 10, 2016

        What about a WooCommerce website? That i’m assuming uses more ‘computing power’ than a standard blog website..

        I have/will set it up on Cloudflare.

        Have been looking into Amazon S3 as an option to serve images, but not sure how to 'calculate’ the benefits, as this is an unknown to me, having never used it before.

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        • hunky January 17, 2016

          Its all about user numbers, more users, more traffic, more traffic, more load. The main benefit of cloud hosting is that you can scale things up with few clicks and minimum down time..

          So start with lower plan and if needed, upgrade to higher plans.

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