Question

Increasing and reducing resources on Droplet

Posted on October 22, 2024
DigitalOcean Droplets
Asked by Michael Kelland

When reducing resources on a droplet are there any configuration changes applied to the droplet’s OS or installed applications? I recently increased the resources, doubled CPU from 2 to 4 and RAM from 4G to 8G for a campaign that increased traffic. Now the campaign is over I reduced back to original size yet now websites load very slow even though there is no CPU utilisation or memory pressure. We have been using this Droplet (Ubuntu) for 2-3 years with no other issues.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• October 24, 2024

Hey Michael,

When you resize a Droplet, especially when reducing resources, the operating system and services/applications themselves don’t automatically reconfigure to account for the reduced resources. This can sometimes lead to performance issues, even if CPU utilization and memory pressure appear normal.

A couple of things to check:

If your swap size wasn’t adjusted after resizing, you may need to reconfigure it to better match the new RAM size. You can follow this guide to add or adjust your swap space:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorial-collections/how-to-add-swap-space
Some services (like database engines or web servers) might still be optimized for the higher resource settings from when you had 8GB RAM and 4 CPUs. It could be worth revisiting those configurations to ensure they align with the current resource limits.

Could you also share more information about your setup? For example what services exactly are you running and etc.

Also, for example, running commands like htop or free -m can give you a better idea of how the resources are being used, and checking web server logs might reveal any bottlenecks. It’ll help pinpoint if the issue is resource-related or something else.

Hope that helps!

- Bobby