Question

How do I know when traffic is too high for droplet based on graphs?

How do I read the graphs? What’s too high CPU usage, memory or disk IO? As an example, I have various basic droplets, all 1 CPU, 1GB ram, and Ubuntu 20.04. I run a few websites on each of them, Grav CMS on Nginx, very lightweight flat-file cms. All the websites have very low traffic, I have an average CPU usage of less than 1% and a few spikes to 10% every few days, while the ram is about 30% all the time, I guess that’s just for running the OS. How do I know when these numbers are too high and it’s time to create a new droplet for new sites? I used to create a new droplet for each site, but after I learned how to properly setup Nginx blocks I started putting multiple sites on the same droplet and didn’t see any drop in performance. Disk IO is usually around a few kb/s with random peaks lower than 2MB/s, same goes for bandwidth.

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Bobby Iliev • March 4, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hi there,

I could suggest monitoring the graphs regularly and in case that you notice a trend that the usage is going up slowly you could consider an upgrade.

Another thing that I could suggest is to check out this introduction to load testing tutorial:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-load-testing

Load testing allows you to test your website and server and see how much traffic it could handle, that way you would know how many people could visit your site.

Regards, Bobby