Dimensioning of the environment

christer

I run several quite small sites, mainly Wordpress and a few Rails applications, on an Opalstack "double stack". Recently I moved a larger production WooCommerce site from another service provider into my environment - a shop which is temporarily closed to visitors, but is planned to reopen in January.

Problem is that I'm not sure that a double stack will be able to handle this site; during the initial testing we have run into memory problems and I have successively increased the allowed Wordpress memory size from 128MB to 256MB then to 512MB and now to 1024MB (which seems to work).

The expected traffic is not very high (around 250-300 sessions and 8000-10000 page views per day) but the database is large: 1GB!

I'm doing this for one of my clients and expect to move the site from my account to a new account; the question is if a double stack will work.

Would be interesting if we could have some simple rules of thumb for how to chose and dimension the environment based on some basic params, such as estimated traffic and site size. (And as a side question I'm also interested to know if it would be possible to move an application and a datbase from one Opalstack account to another)

nick

christer Would be interesting if we could have some simple rules of thumb for how to chose and dimension the environment based on some basic params, such as estimated traffic and site size. (And as a side question I'm also interested to know if it would be possible to move an application and a datbase from one Opalstack account to another)

Due to the dynamic nature of web applications and web traffic this is never that easy to determine without some testing or tracking on the existing server. Given you had to set the memory usage to 1024MB for the site to operate in a testing environment, I would consider that that was not even with regular traffic - so if that is the case then perhaps your current plan would be lacking.

But maybe your other apps use very little of your plan that will make room for the new app. You can double check your existing usage using many different commands from the terminal of the user hosting the apps. For example this would give you the current total memory usage in Megabytes, smem -tk -c "pid user command name pss".

However, if you wanted to be on the safe side and upgrade for more resources, then we generally recommend the 4GB VPS as a good starting place. We can always resize it on the go if needed after moving you to any VPS plan. More details on pricing, etc: https://opalstack.com/pricing.html

Also, at this time we're unable automate the process of moving applications to other accounts. You would have to do it the traditional way, ie exporting/importing using a mix of SFTP and the command line to move the data into new apps/dbs on the target account.

christer

Thanks for this information. Memory use is well below the limits I have, but the problem occurs exactly when there is an update to the database, which is difficult to capture. Anyway, we will consider your advice about VPS.

anjanesh

If there's a demand then maybe OpalStack can offer servers having database(s) alone. A standalone database server without the remaining software like nginx, apache, php, python etc etc. This probably is useful for high-end traffic websites and isolating apps from the rest. Same for media storage - I am thinking of using bunny.net for websites having high media load like a photography social website or something.

sean

anjanesh we're considering offering things like standalone DBs and object storage as managed services. For now if you need a dedicated DB server you can purchase one of our VPS plans and run your databases there separate from your sites.