I put together a practical breakdown of how many users a small 1 vCPU + 2 GB RAM server can realistically handle. The answer isn’t simply “X users” because it depends heavily on the workload, application stack, caching, database usage, concurrent requests, and whether you’re serving static or dynamic content. For anyone running small self-hosted services or websites on inexpensive VPS instances, this may be useful
CallMeAl@piefed.zipIts the wrong question. workload matters far more than number of users.
1 user can be too many or 1000 just fine, depending on workload.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
ifGoingToCrashDont@lemmy.world 9 minutes ago
Great work! Enjoyable read. I’ve always thought those basic droplets would choke as soon as any significant traffic began to scale up, but this shows it can stretch pretty far.
The only real issue here is that the tests assume applications are receiving legitimate human visits, but we know something like 90% of all traffic are bots and scrapers. Serving 4000 actual users would be significant, because the application could be serving more like 40,000 other requests from bots in that case. That’s why we’re inclined to not launch apps without implementing advanced caching and CDNs.