after deploy with delayed_job, all memory is occupied

Question

I have a linode 512 mb ram with ubuntu 10.04 64 bits with a rails app + mongodb + nginx + unicorn.

I use sunspot solr gem and delayed_job gem

When I make a new deploy with delayed job:

after "deploy:restart",   "delayed_job:start"

The server go very very slow and very very bad.

If I write in terminal:

free -m

I get:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           487        481          5          0          1         16
-/+ buffers/cache:        463         23
Swap:          255        226         29

I get errors like Errno::ENOMEM (Cannot allocate memory... on my rails log.

My question is if I need upgrade my linode or change to dedicated server to work with delayed_job gem

I have been taking a look to http://www.hetzner.de/en/ for dedicated server.

If I need upgrade my linode, How much memory do I need to run properly delayed_job gem?

Delayed job in my local ubuntu machine with 4GB ram is working fine.

Thank you very much

Answer 1

Yes you need to increase RAM. Unicorn and delayed jobs will result in at least 2 running Rails processes, and 3 during a deploy.

Your Rails instance is probably 200 MB each. I think 512 MB is fine for Rails deployments without background processes, but with them I recommend 1024.