Pros and cons of using memory lower than 1GB

[Jehan_Musa]

Continuing the discussion from What size server do you all use?:

@Kevin

600MB should be more than enough to run most Ghost blogs, the main problem you will have is yarn using way more than that to install dependencies. If you can add swap or you’re using pre-built images with deps already there then the install side of things should be ok.

I believe the minimum RAM for ghost installation is 1GB , (as stated in documentation)
and for lower than 1GB we can use swap memory

the question is

what is the pros and cons of using memory lower than 1GB with swap memory?

does it affect performance if we don’t use swap memory?

p/s: the pros i believe is the cost is lower (especially when hosted on google cloud platform)

any drawbacks?

AND

@Hannah

A couple of things to check:

Are you using the default theme?

The theme is the place where you as a user have the most ability to cause performance bottlenecks by accident, as it were.

Are you up-to-date?

We regularly test and make improvements to performance, so it should pay off to keep up-to-date. If your performance decreases significantly after an update, we’d want to know about it.

the part about

the theme is the place where you as a user have the most ability to cause performance bottlenecks by accident, as it were

does this refer to default theme or custom made theme (i know that the things to check is saying default them but does not know to which theme the theme really refer to) , just want confirmation, maybe @Hannah can explain. i am sorry for that

[Kevin]

@Jehan_Musa

I believe the minimum RAM for ghost installation is 1GB , (as stated in documentation)
and for lower than 1GB we can use swap memory

The minimum 1GB is stated because the installation process which uses yarn and npm can use that much memory so you need at least that or some swap space to ensure the normal installation procedure works. If you are using a different installation process such as pre-built containers then the memory requirements may be different.

When running Ghost typically uses ~250MB of memory for small-moderate sized blogs but it might spike higher during certain operations. It’s always recommended to monitor memory and performance for your particular content and traffic patterns so that you can plan your infrastructure appropriately.

does it affect performance if we don’t use swap memory?

As stated above swap will likely only be used during installation so shouldn’t have any effect on the performance of your blog. Swap space is slow compared to memory so it’s always preferable for it not to be used by running programs. However simply having swap space available on a server will not affect performance one way or the other - you need to monitor your memory usage to see if swap is being used due to high memory usage, if it is then increase the amount of memory you have.

If you’re unsure what swap memory is I recommend reading up on it - What is swap memory? - Server Fault

does this refer to default theme or custom made theme

It’s referring to custom themes. When you create a theme you have all of the theme API available to you so it’s possible to use it in ways that cause performance problems similar to how you can create performance issues with general programming languages. The default theme is not known to have any performance issues.