Hosting multiple sites on 1GB RAM server causes memory exhaustion
criticalResource ContentionUpdated May 1, 2012(via Exa)
Technologies:
How to detect:
Running 25 sites with 566 MB total Gunicorn memory usage plus Nginx (8 MB), Celery (23 MB), and other processes on a 1024 MB RAM server results in near 100% memory utilization (906 MB used, 87 MB free) and heavy swapping (828 MB swapped).
Recommended action:
Calculate total memory requirements for all services (Gunicorn workers across all sites + Nginx + Celery + Redis + buffers/cache). Ensure total usage stays below 70-80% of available RAM to avoid swapping. With limited RAM, reduce sites per server to 1-2, or distribute across multiple servers. Even single-worker Gunicorn processes require significant RAM per site.