Which size of droplet should i use for my web-site?

Question

Hello there,

I have a question for you, actually i need help.

I have a web-site, which had 61.360 unique visitors and 1.307.283 page views in December 2013. For this web-site i have been using second plan of droplet on DigitalOcean which is 1 GB ram/1 cpu. But in january my hits increased %10 rate, so my web-site slowed down little bit.

Here is my question, can i solve that problem some server-side coding or do i have to increase/resize my droplet’s size.

Sorry for bad english, thanks for understanding.

alexdo · Answer

Hello, all

Choosing the right Droplet plan depends on your workload. An oversized Droplet would underuse its resources and cost more, but an undersized Droplet running at full CPU or memory would suffer from degraded performance or errors.

You can also resize a Droplet to a larger plan after creation, including resizing to a larger Droplet plan of a different kind. For example, you can resize from a Basic Droplet plan to a larger CPU-Optimized Droplet plan. See the Droplet pricing page for a full list of plans and prices.

You can always check our tutorial on Choosing the Right Droplet Plan

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/resources/choose-plan/

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex

cvarda · Answer

Looks like most of CPU usage is from MySQL. From this point you can consider analyzing which queries are taking too much time to run. Also, you can migrate just MySQL to another, larger server (you will get more CPU cores for the price).

hakan.snn · Answer

Thank you so much.

Kamal Nasser · Answer

Looks like there’s quite a bit of load on the CPU. Try upgrading to a plan with more CPUs—does that help?

hakan.snn · Answer

I run top command from shell. Here’s the i got;

[root@s ~]# top
top - 12:45:50 up 1 day, 5:31, 1 user, load average: 5.34, 5.40, 5.58
Mem: 1020388k total, 880792k used, 139596k free, 61336k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 413648k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
20437 mysql 20 0 1048m 189m 7232 S 73.2 19.1 704:47.40 mysqld
6701 apache 20 0 510m 20m 9236 S 1.3 2.0 0:00.26 httpd
1139 admin 20 0 509m 21m 10m S 1.0 2.1 0:02.30 httpd
4008 apache 20 0 508m 20m 10m S 1.0 2.0 0:01.31 httpd

cvarda · Answer

I would try first inspect your Droplet’s CPU and memory usage. Try using htop - an interactive process viewer for Linux.

So you can find out if you’re running out of memory (causing swap) or too much CPU processing (and what is using that resources).

http://hisham.hm/htop/

Question

Which size of droplet should i use for my web-site?