how to calculate required server RAM ?

VisionsOfCody

I wasn't too sure where to post this so i ended up here ...

I'm currently taking care of a fair number of sites hosted on varying different plans and i have just realized that it would be cheaper to rent a private virtual server and put them all on there - also, I'd be able to tinker with the server more than i can now with normal shared hosting

but the problem's that the price of the VPS really seems to depend on how much RAM and drive space it has. The drive space is easy to calculate - but is there any way of calculating if i need 128 MB, 256 MB or 512 MB of RAM ??

thanks

MarkR

RAM usage is very dependent on the web server and configuration. You should be mindful of the threading / process model of your web server, how many threads / processes it uses, and other factors.

Try it out on your dev box with a load tester such as ApacheBench, using various settings for your web server's processes / threads and other settings. Measure the ram usage carefully.

The critical thing I must state, is if you're using a prefork Apache on Unix, do NOT set MaxClients too high - you absolutely must not. A limited-RAM machine using PHP should not normally have MaxClients more than 50. Even that might stretch it.

Measure using existing OS tools + ApacheBench.

Mark

VisionsOfCody

MarkR wrote:
Try it out on your dev box with a load tester such as ApacheBench,

thanks for your reply - I'll check out ApacheBench - that's a new one for me !

cheers

Warlock

I think there is tools where you can connect with ssh and then run memory benchamrk.