Why is it not possible to get wordpress with one click on a 512 MB droplet?

Hey There. I maintain the WordPress One-Click image. This change was made several months back. The restriction was put in place based on memory requirements but our system only currently restricts creates based on the size of the droplet used to generate the image with the message showing the disk space message (there is a ticket open internally to update this).

We chose to restrict WordPress droplets to the 1GB size because a standard WordPress + LAMP install on a 512MB droplet will, within a week, crash due to MySQL running out of memory.

You can still create a 512MB WordPress droplet.

Copy the script found here.

On the create page, select a 512MB droplet and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as your operating system.

Check the “user-data” checkbox and paste the script into the box that appears.

Select any other options and click create.

If you plan to launch more droplets like this you can immediately power off the new droplet and create a snapshot image to use for new creates.

To get around MySQL crashing the first thing you’ll want to do is to create a swap file on your droplet. These commands will create a 1GB swap file, enable it and set it to be used automatically on reboot:

fallocate -l 1G /swapfile;
chmod 600 /swapfile;
mkswap /swapfile;
swapon /swapfile;
 echo "/swapfile   none    swap    sw    0   0" >> /etc/fstab;

I would also recommend using a caching plugin or CDN. Placing CloudFlare’s free service in front of your droplet or using an existing caching or CDN wordpress plugin can do this. While a CDN and caching are not absolutely necessary, they should speed up your site’s load time and lessen the load if you receive a lot of traffic.

I hope this information will help. We want to make it as easy as possible to create the stack you want to run but continuing to offer a WordPress image for 512MB droplets that was likely to crash if you didn’t take further steps to optimize it was not a user-friendly way to do it.

If you have any other questions or run into any problems we’re here to help.

Hopefully this ain’t considering commenting out of term, but yes basicly what ryan said a lot of people had crash problems, I don’t use wordpress myself but I do have a 512mb droplet and had mysql memory problems, and every post I have seen prople always say use a swap file to fix it.

The solution I found was that linux puts the ram into a cache “to supposedly make it more available, by releasing it”, there is a string you can type into the terminal that will release the ram from cache, I put it into a cron job on my server and it runs it after so many hours,

And never had a crash since, so it’s possible it may work for using wordpress also, would just have to test, when I get off work I can copy the script and paste it here if anyone wants to try it.

create a new file and paste this in it

#!/bin/sh

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

and save it and call it whatever_you_want.sh

then in the terminal type sh and the location of the file if your in the folder where you put it just type in the name you called it after sh, after hitting enter to find out if it worked run top and look at the used mem compared to the free mem, also helps if you run top first to see what the mem status is at

you may have to type sudo first if your not using root