Is a Slice 256 enough for Apache2 + Passenger hosting AT LEAST 4 Rails sites?

Question

I've a Slice 256 with 4 Rails 1.2.6 sites running pretty decently on Lighttpd + FastCGI (Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS upgraded from 6.06 LTS); although it's such and old configuration, it's proven reliable enough for my smallish websites.

Now I'd like to upgrade some to Rails 2.x and I'm wondering if the same Slice 256 can take an Apache2 + Passenger configuration, since it worked great on my local development Linux box.

So my question is: Is a Slice 256 enough for Apache2 + Passenger hosting AT LEAST 4 Rails sites?

Any advice and experiencies on this will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

In case anyone is confused, the asker is probably refering the 256 MB VPS at Slicehost.com

And to answer your question: It depends.

Could you run four Twitters, of course not. Could you run 4 sites that will have 1 (or less) concurrent user between them then yes, you could.

Answer 2

I'm not entirely sure about moving from 1.2 to 2.3. I do know that moving from 2.2 to 2.3 has some features to save memory (more specifically with routes).

If these are production sites, I would recommend setting up a new 256 slice and trying the upgrade. It's good to have a development slice anyways.

Answer 3

In my experience; running a simple Typo blog would frequently consume more than 64M of memory on a shared host with basically no traffic.

A large, 100+ resource 2.3 Rails app with Memcached, all the bells and whistles, etc. will sometimes hit 420MB of memory.

Of course, the answer really is "it depends". It depends on your code, your traffic, your server, your database schema, your table indexes, etc.

Answer 4

Passenger advices that u use a pool of two passenger children on a 256-slice. This means that it can process two parallel requests at the same time. (correct me if i'm wrong about that one) So as Nick was saying, it all depends on how many hits your (clients) sites are getting.

Answer 5

I'd say no. I'm assuming what you mean by "4 sites" is 4 rails instances. 2 is probably a better fit for a 256MB slice, and even that may be pushing it if you need to run cron/rake tasts or things like that.