Memory Usage

[base909]

Hello,
First I want to say that I like IPB a lot! Well done :)
But I'm about to purchase a license for my website. That's not a problem. But wat is a problem, is the memory usage of IPB.

I dit some testing with IPB3 beta 3 and i came around 5 MB of memory usage. That aint nothing aint it?
But will this give any problems if I have about 500 visitors online but just 1 GB of RAM in my server.

Can somebody explain a bit more about this whole memory thing?

Thanks :)

[Mat Barrie]

I wouldn't worry too much about it, most of that usage is for caches and objects which are shared among all active users (avoids costly DB queries). But I'd send an email to the sales people to confirm.

Bear in mind IPB3 hasn't been fully optimised yet, so it using a large chunk of memory isn't anything to be too worried about.

[Darkside_RG_merged]

If you anticipate 500 active users online within 15 minutes think 2Gb at least or preferably 4Gb

[Mat Barrie]

Of course, don't take anyone's word for it who doesn't have a forum with the same sort of activity you're expecting (I don't either by the way, so I wont answer for you). I still say contact sales (or if one of the kind folks who develops the software can pitch in and tell us how much memory THIS server happens to have, that'd answer this fellow's question!)

[rct2·com]

I wouldn't worry too much about it, most of that usage is for caches and objects which are shared among all active users

Is that true? My understanding is that the cache is dedicated to me when I visit, and therefore there are several copies of the cache, depending upon how may visitors there are. Or more specifically, on how many instances of Apache are running.

[Darkside_RG_merged]

This is kind of like the how long is a piece of string. Having kept a board online "barely" with 250 online on a server with 512Mb I wouldn't recommend that as fun as it involved restarting Apache every 15 mins.

There are some replies about from the developers etc this one for instance which at the moment unfortunately the topic starter will not be able to read.

Amongst the factors to consider is how many posts do you have as to keep a forum usable you want to keep the indexes in RAM, our most online was 753 about half and half guests and members at the time that was on a 2Gb server and the load was about 0.5 however we do have spinx post table then was about 350K at renewal time we opted for going with a new server built from source again and with 4Gb as the posts table is now in excess of 1 million.

If you are looking at 500 online are you considering converting an existing forum? as well as numbers of members you need to think about size of the database and what people are doing i.e. search is very resource intensive on a big board install spinx as that helps a lot.

If you have to little RAM things will start going in to swap and you really don't want that as it will just compound the problem and the site will grind to a halt.

[bfarber]

If you have 500 people online simultaneously, I'd definitely recommend 4GB memory. Your server will definitely thank you for it.

1) You should NOT use IP.Board BETA 3 (or any beta release) for your live site - and thus shouldn't have 500 people hitting it...
2) We are still optimizing IP.Board 3.0, and memory usage should likely drop before final release
3) Actual memory usage will fluctuate. We've seen it spike to 12-13MB here for single page views, for instance. It depends on a lot of factors.


All in all though, I don't think you'll like running a site with 500 users online (which would indicate to me you have a decent amount of data in the database as well) with just 1GB RAM.