Is the RAM your paying for dedicated or burst?

June 6, 2013 3.6k views
hi148036
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hi148036
For example, on the lowest level plan you get 512mb, is the actual RAM 256mb with a 256mb burst?
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8 Answers
cwebersd June 14, 2013
Swapping on SSD will still be terrible, just not as bad as on spinning disks. RAM access latency is measured in single digit nanoseconds, SSD access latency is 50-100 microseconds, HD access latency is 11-20 milliseconds. So, SSDs are 200x quicker to respond than harddrives, but still about 10,000 times slower than RAM.
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nightflash June 6, 2013
Actual RAM is 512 Mb.
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kamaln7 MOD June 8, 2013
All RAM is dedicated to your droplet. The kernel does take a bit of RAM so you'll end up with ~490MB memory on the 512MB droplet.
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sb73542 June 8, 2013
Any bursting allowed?
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kamaln7 MOD June 8, 2013
@sb73542 you can set up swap on your droplet: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-12-04
How To Add Swap on Ubuntu 12.04
by Etel Sverdlov
Linux swaps allow a system to harness more memory than was originally physically available. Here's how to set up a linux swap file on Ubuntu 12.04
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sb73542 June 10, 2013
Ah, interesting option. How is swap performance on SSD? I imagine it's considerably closer to that of actual RAM.

Any instructions for CentOS / Debian?
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kamaln7 MOD June 10, 2013
The Ubuntu article should work on Debian. We have another article for CentOS: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-add-swap-on-centos-6
How To Add Swap on CentOS 6
by Etel Sverdlov
Linux swaps allow a system to harness more memory than was originally physically available. Here's how to set up a linux swap file on CentOS 6
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football93309 July 2, 2013
Good answer cwebersd
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