Hardware configurations on 2 DO servers......

June 15, 2018 1.3k views
Apache Monitoring Ubuntu 16.04
jamesburns1977
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jamesburns1977

Hi,

I created and deployed my first Digital Ocean server just over a year ago when I created a wealth advisory site for millennials (https://wealth-hack.com). The site is powered in a fairly standard manner, Ubuntu 160.4, with Wordpress on top and a premium template making it look not home made. I didn't have a huge amount of traffic but from time to time, would see 'memory utilization is above 85%' messages. The memory issues would tend to resolve themselves quickly so I didn't spend too much time on that.

I created my second droplet a few months ago to start a second site, this time a sports betting advisory platform (https://betsharper.com). I put similar tech and it has been running absolutely seamlessly. I wondered why.

So when I checked back, I think the specs for a default droplet may have changed in the last year. My initial droplet (wealth-hack) comes with half a gig of memory, my newer droplet (betsharper) has 1 gig. Any advice on what I should do? Is there a way to move the old droplet to the new standard? Or should I diagnose the memory consumption on wealth-hack regardless? As things stand, the memory use on idle hovers just under 80% and apache 2 is consuming 113.41% (according to the 'top processes' monitoring widget within DO's management GUI).

Thanks in advance,
James.

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3 Answers
aha MOD June 18, 2018

Hi James -

  • Did Droplet specs change in the last year? Yes! In January 2018 DigitalOcean released a major pricing update that at least doubled RAM on every Droplet size, and increased SSD storage on most, and even number of vCPUs on some plans.
  • Is there a way to move the old droplet to the new standard? Yes! Go to your old Droplet's page in the control panel and click Resize. Resizing to the NEW $5 Droplet plan will double your RAM to 1GB and give you 5GB more SSD storage. NOTE: Resizing will require you to restart your Droplet, if you've never restarted it, you may need to login afterwards and confirm Wordpress/MySQL etc.. are correctly set to auto-run on startup.
  • Should I diagnose the memory consumption on wealth-hack regardless? - Do you get the memory usage alerts around the same time of day? Often there is a daily log aggregation or backup process that momentarily surges memory usage, but isn't otherwise a problem. If you are noticing that your site is generally slow, there are tons of other optimizations you can make, here's a good place to start: https://serverpilot.io/community/articles/how-to-reduce-php-and-wordpress-memory-usage.html
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jamesburns1977 June 26, 2018

A free upgrade to bring WealthHack up to the level of BetSharper! Great news @aha, many thanks for the share. My next backup is a few days away, I'll get through this and then look to activate the resize option:)

I'll take a look at performance post upgrade to see if I still have horsepower issues and if so, look to use your helpful optimization guide. Again, appreciate your advice @aha:)

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jamesburns1977 June 26, 2018

Couldn't help it, I struck while the iron was hot and resized it. Utterly faultless and conducted literally within 2 mins! Very very impressed Team DigitalOcean. I continue to be a very happy customer (and tell my friends and coworkers the same)......

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