How much RAM does a virtual server need? Detailed scenarios.
On quora.com u could mostly read brief notes like the minimum for woocommerce server is 4GB. If fact. Does it tell something to u? U probably mean yes, but its more in it. Under my research I did not find the answer on the internet. Sometimes it can be a pain even for experts to find a solution. Thus, I decided to tell our experience to save others from our pain and to call others to share their experience in the discussion below.
Our experience:
Test tools: Pingdom Speed Test, own stopwatch (GT Metrix is far away from middle Europe and did not give stable results)
web: multilingual woo commerce sex shop web Extasica, 807Kb, 110 requests, concurrent users 0-10(max traffic)
WP, Woo commerce 700 products, 30 Articles, Translate press (this plugin combo messes with any optimization, so never an optimization plugin)
250users, 1200 pages per day
sister web on the shared virtual server this WP web magazinspotrebitele.cz: 170 pages per day
Insufficient virtual server RAM: 1 CPU 2GB RAM, like 200MB free RAM (later also 3GB) RAM RAM, Extasica DB not fully migrated to https (Really simple SSL plugin)
Pingdom test upload: with Translate press plugin e.g. extasica.com/en 6-8s (even with 0 users), no translate press (original Czech) 2,5s – sufficient for us
stop watch: for TP foreign language 3,5s-12s, no translate press 2,5s
From the Translate press support we also got no good advice as usually, they told us to use a cache plugin which did not solved our problem at all. Free WP Optimize was the best from many plugins even better than Premium WP rocket. But after short time any cache plugin fell into a loop error with 20s upload time, so cache plugins were unusable. Increasing RAM 3GB no help.
sister web magazinspotrebitele.cz on the shared server: pingdom 0,8s – We can see that the server was not overloaded by users requests and extasica.com problems were due to software and database demands.
Our coder with 5ys specialistation at big woo commerce plugin coding, whom he much appreciate, was not right at all when he stated its seems totally overpowered. We also aked our server provided if they think we should increase RAM, they answered vaguely like our RAM is almost fully used, we guess u are sort of fine, we will add u 1GB for testing and try it. So they also had no notion … Note that due to buff / cache, swap share memory ur picture about used virtual RAM could be pretty unprecise.
Sufficient virtual server: 2 CPU 4GB RAM, like 600MB free RAM
Increasing RAM to 4GB and CPU to 2 helped dramaticly.
Upload time in foreign language without cache: 2,5-3,5s with which we were happy (from previus 3,5-12s!!)
Added WP fastest cache / unpaid desktop version
Pingdom: translate press foreign language upload time 0,7-0,8s
stop watch: translate press foreign languge upload time like 1-1,5s
Our coder said that full migration DB to https helped (Really Simple SSL plugin causing avoid double page reading could be removed).
WP optimize is much slower like 1,8s
WP Rocket not tried in this configuration
Cache flaws: When like 15 products is fastly opened for edit concurrently, the site goes into loop.
sister web magazinspotrebitele.cz on the shared server: No change – pingdom 0,8s
Over powered virtual server: 4 CPU 8GB RAM / no improvement
Our cache choice: WP Fastest cache. Dont know it its the best, unlike WP Rocket (1y license), its licence for unlimited time and I also dont wanna do the bunch of test with the other plugins again. Its not just about switch on / off – it would mean a lot of „web possible mess up options“ testing and with woo commerce and TP combo its not a fun at all…
We can see one more plugin in a special combo (in our case Translate press with Woo commerce) could need wholly different server RAM and software optimization, even for 0 user count scenario …. Such combo can also cause ur cache plugin works worse or better than other cache plugins.
I am not an expert, so i cant give more advice. The rest is upon ur experience in the comments.
Pls state (with insusfficient description ur comment can be considered useless and denied):
ur web and link:
server configuration:
SW configuration (especially final applications, I suppose, core would be usually Debian among coments, if other state the server OS and other necessary parameters as well):
http requests number, page size (according pingdom speed test):
traffic per day – users, sites:
page upload Pingdom speed test time:
cache plugins:
And most appreciated: What was not working for u and solution that helped (configuration, tweaks, type of cache plugin) :
Pls be patient site is checked and comment accepted about once a week …