Minimum Requirements?

Tsaukpaetra

Cross-post from Meta.Discourse.org: (Obviously, swapping Flarum for Discourse here) because I was actually curious and couldn't find a specs list.

I would expect this to run somewhat well even under a wimpy setup, but was curious what the devs had to say.

OP copy-pasta'd below for context:

I’ve seen it rehashed in a few topics, but I wanted to make sure I have my understanding is correct on this.

I’d like to host Discourse as the modern forum frontend for a (very small) discussion board for my YouTube channel (we have a Discord server, but endless walls of text and images gets really messy after a while).

I really like the UI of Discourse and would like to try installing it to try it out, but the docs mention 1 Gb being a minimum (and with that size swapping is mandatory). I really don’t have the money to spare (especially not with the YouTube adsense drama cutting everyone off) and can’t afford an extra $20/mo for an idea.

I’ve seen other forums out there that try to more or less emulate what Discourse is doing but with smaller requirements (much better!) like NodeBB with fewer required software packages and the memory requirement is 512Mb (apparently without needing swap? Docs don’t really say), or even Flarum (doesn’t even mention a memory requirement, though since it’s only PHP+Mysql I can assume it would run fine in way under 512 Mb).

I know, obviously getting a super-beefy host with gigarams and megabits would be preferred, but I just don’t have the cash on hand for this.

Am I barking up the wrong tree looking to have the best experience on a 512 Mb (or less) server? Or does someone know a good host I can use for $5 or less that can adequately run Discourse?

luceos

Tsaukpaetra installation of Flarum using composer does require quite some RAM because it holds all dependencies in memory. If you could do the installation locally and just upload your files that should reduce that requirement. In order to understand whether your server is meeting all requirements you can use the (new) command composer offers: composer check-platform-reqs. Aside from that hurdle, you could pretty well run Flarum on a shared machine ?

webeindustry

Discourse isn't only memory hungry it also rips through a lot of CPU as requests pile up. You can run flarum on a 512MB just create a 1GB of swapfile to deal with composer. If you're looking for high memory host on the cheap, you can always use a sandbox OVH instance, they run $3.49/m for 2GB just realize these are massively oversold, and intended for test projects. You can use it for a small forum, but there will be irregular latency in your requests. You could get a good day without any users noticing issues, and then a bad week where on and off requests have significant delay. All VPS that don't provide "guaranteed resources" have this potential, it just depends how high they oversell the resources.

Ralkage

To extend on the current responses, I typically test the software/application locally before I go ahead and dish out anywhere from $2.50 - $10.00 USB on a VPS/Instance (I use Vultr for my live tests). $5 can get you going on a Vultr instance especially with giving Flarum a test spin in a live VPS set up.

I have yet to test Flarum on a Vultr $2.50 instance due to you having to already have a acurrent instance bought and in-use to be able to grab the $2.50 plan.