alt Hacker NewsThere are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM. You can use it for caches or a database that supports concurrent writes. The $15 difference won’t make any financial difference if you are trying to run a small business.
Thinking about on how to fit everything on a $5 VPS does not help your business.
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NVME read latency is around 100usec, a SQLite3 database in the low terabytes needs somewhere between 3-5 random IOs per point lookup, so you're talking worst case for an already meaningful amount of data about 0.5ms per cold lookup. Say your app is complex and makes 10 of these per request, 5 ms. That leaves you serving 200 requests/sec before ever needing any kind of cache.
That's 17 million hits per day in about 3.9 MiB/sec sustained disk IO, before factoring in the parallelism that almost any bargain bucket NVME drive already offers (allowing you to at least 4x these numbers). But already you're talking about quadrupling the infrastructure spend before serving a single request, which is the entire point of the article.
> There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM
There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, and instead to focus on generating business value to customers and getting more paying customers. I think it’s what many engineers are keen to overlook behind fun technical details.
I think we have to re-think and re-evaluate RAM usage on modern systems that use swapping with CPU-assisted page compression and fast, modern NVMe drives.
The Macbook Neo with 8GB RAM is a showcase of how people underistimated its capabilities due to low amount of RAM before launch, yet after release all the reviewers point to a larger set of capabilities without any issues that people didn't predict pre-launch.
Or better yet, go with a euro provider like Hetzner and get 8GB of RAM for $10 or so. :)
Even their $5 plan gives 4GB.
The reason would be YAGNI. Apparently 1GB doesn’t constitute an actual limit for OP’s use case. I’m sure he’ll upgrade if and when the need arises.
> "There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM"
> Immediately proposes alternative which is literally 4x the cost.
> There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM. By paying $20 instead of $5 you can get at least 8gb of RAM.
In my head, I call this the 'doubling algorithm'.
If there's anything that's both relatively cheap and useful, but where "more" (either in quality or quantity) has additional utility, 2x it.
Then 2x it again.
Repeat until either: the price change becomes noticeable or utility stops being gained.
Tl;dr -- saving order-of single dollars is rarely worth the tradeoffs.
It doesn't look like they think about how to make it fit though. They just use a known good go template
Where can you get 8GB for $20?
Hetzner, OVH and others offer 4-8gb and 2-4 cores for the same ~5$
$15 is not exactly zero, is it? If you don't need more than 1GB, why pay anything for more than 1GB?
I recall running LAMP stacks on something like 128MB about 20 years ago and not really having problems with memory. Most current website backends are not really much more complicated than they were back then if you don't haul in bloat.