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Richard Stelling
Asked: 2009-08-17 05:29:32 +0800 CST

Enough RAM to run multiple Wordpress sites

  • 772

I recently moved about 6 sites from a dedicated server to "the cloud". This being a virtualized CentOS with limited RAM and HD space.

These sties are mostly static, but some are Wordpress based. All the sites get very minimal traffic < 100 page views / per day each.

The server has only 512MB of RAM, as you can see from the screen-shot usage is low.

Webmin

We don't expect any of the sites to "explode" with traffic, several may get 1000+ page views per day when they release new products, but this will only last for 2-3 days at most.

  • Do you think I can get away with this minimum set up?
  • Should I run some bench marking tools to determine the limits? If so, any suggestions?

NB: This cloud hosting solution is an order of magnitude cheaper than the dedicated (and managed) server. (Admittedly at an expensive hosting provider)

virtualization

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Short answer: probably.

    It's definitely worth reading this post about Wordpress's CPU usage and taking some pre-emptive action to mitigate the load if your sites ever do become popular. Installing one of the caching plugins, in particular, is an absolute must.

    As regards benchmarking, I've used ApacheBench before, which seems to work well - you can run it against any web server, not just Apache.

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  2. Install a wordpress plugin called WP Super Cache, and you'll definitely be fine. I run several wordpress sites that get > 1000 pageviews a day on a virtual private server with 256MB of RAM and it runs perfectly. The VPS only costs me $25/mo. Cheap is good!

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  3. I would look at how many simultaneous connections apache (or which ever HTTPD server you're using) can handle and how much each thread uses in memory. In a past job, we had an apache install where each instance used 4MB of memory x 256 max simultaneous connects = more memory than we had on the server at the time.

    Calculating how much memory the server will be using between all the services running and figuring out what the extra cost of more traffic is once the caches have been primed should keep you busy in excel for a while.

    I would consider something like cacti or nagios to monitor the server and keeping a backup system in place you can mod-rewrite the traffic to in case of overload.

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