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Comment by rschmitty | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know how many rails apps a $5 DO can handle? is a $5 DO = 1 heroku dyno?

I'm running GitLab (which is a rails app) with postgres (small database, so it's not using a lot of memory) on a $5 droplet. It's using about 50-75% of my memory. Here's what free says:

                 total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
    Mem:        503516     488644      14872          0       9036     203300
    -/+ buffers/cache:     276308     227208
    Swap:      1048572     153704     894868

Depending on your apps' memory usage, you might be able to put two apps on a $5 droplet (I'd recommend adding a swapfile so you don't run out of memory at some point - since they're using SSDs, swapping is not that bad.)

Sweet thanks. Do you use Passenger mod on nginx or some kinda setup?

GitLab is using puma (configured to 1 worker/8 threads in my case), and I'm running nginx in front of it. Sidekiq seems to be eating the biggest chunk of my memory (~20%), so I might be able to save some memory by tuning that.

Same as the other reply. I'm using Unicorn behind Nginx. Sidekiq is eating the biggest chunk of my memory too, and I haven't tried tuning it yet. Haven't "needed" to.

It depends on a lot of things. Try load testing it.

I modified bees with machine guns to run on DigitalOcean instead of AWS, so you can load test to your heart's desire. it's here: https://github.com/rozap/minnowswithmachineguns

Probably, as the $5 instance is only 1 core. You might be able to squeeze more on if you aren't using much memory, or don't mind adding swap space (ssd swap is fast enough for me...)

this is unlike heroku because you are given a server you have root access to. meaning you can actually setup unlimited* rails apps.

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