I'm using $20 droplet running 2 sites having 1500 page views combined. But still, it's taking about 44% of memory. Can you suggest me plugins, etc. to decrease backend load? Site: https://technoclever.com/
Hi @aabansod
When you say "1500 page views" - over which time period?
It's normal for a WordPress installation to take up to 1GB of RAM (that includes the OS, Apache, PHP and MySQL), so the 44% RAM usage is what I would call normal.
If you want to speed up your WordPress, then the best way to do that would be with cache. There's WordPress plugins that can help with that, if you want the easy way.
There's two very popular free plugins - but there are several others and some pay plugins:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
Thanks for replying! For now, I've max 20 realtime visitors. I've installed WP Super Cache on TechnoClever.com But no difference at all. I've also read one was able to manage 900+ realtime visitors on his WordPress site on $5 droplet.
Unless you are very experienced in server tweaking, then it's difficult to even run WordPress on a $5 droplet (512MB RAM), which is also why DigitalOcean recommends that you use at least 1GB RAM.
But to have 900+ active visitors would require a highly configured cache, so almost no-one actually hits WordPress, but just gets a static cache file instead.
It sound like you're using Google Analytics, since you call it "realtime visitors", which doesn't say a lot, since that's spread out over a period of 1 minute.
When you're talking about servers, it all comes down to concurrent connections.
But your WP Super Cache does work. Look at your page source - all the way in the bottom, it says:
<!-- Dynamic page generated in 0.165 seconds. -->
<!-- Cached page generated by WP-Super-Cache on 2017-07-29 22:38:51 -->
But if you're logged into WordPress, then it does not give the cached page, it serves the dynamic page, since it's expecting you're going to edit the site.
Visit your page in incognito/private-browsing to see how your site behaves as a regular visitor.
Wow! That's Surprising! The site is behaving good. But I want to reduce server load at backend.
But what's the current problem with the server load? The 44% RAM usage would be fairly normal. You should only focus on resources if you constantly use above 80% (CPU, RAM or disk).
Are there other problems?
If you want a smaller backend, then you should look at changing Apache with Nginx and mod_php with PHP-FPM.
You then also need to tweak the configuration a bit, since most visitors will only get the cache files (served by Nginx), so there's no reason having too many PHP processes sitting and waiting.
And you then need to tune your MySQL (where I would recommend MariaDB instead), so it's in-tune with the amount of PHP processes and the amount of data you have in the database. That way, you're keeping the resource level to a minimum.
Thanks for letting me know. In case of GoDaddy 512MB RAM shared plan, I was able to handle 125+ realtime visitors $5/ month plan. Here, I'm having 2GB RAM plan $24/month. Digital Ocean is expensive but offers hassle free scalability. Hope, Soon, I'll get option to only increase RAM in future.