Question When should I consider upgrading VPS from a RAM perspective?

[Craig1986]

I currently run a VPS with 1 Core Processor and 1GB of RAM. After running the 'free -m' command, I could see that the RAM usage would fluctuate between 750MB to 850MB of RAM when there was no traffic on the website. As soon as the website received one visitor, the RAM usage would start fluctuating between 950MB to 980MB of RAM.

Would I be right in thinking that it would be time to upgrade the VPS, so that it has more RAM? For future reference, is there a broad rule of thumb on when a VPS should be upgraded in terms of RAM and Processors etc?

As a side note, what can cause the RAM usage to increase when there is no traffic on the website?

 

[IgorG]

Turning on a swap can help you for a while.

 

[Craig1986]

Turning on a swap can help you for a while.

The Swap seems active, whereby no matter how much RAM is used, the Swap remains as 386MB being used with 637MB remaining free.

 

[MarkM]

I'd probably go ahead and add another 1GB of RAM, minimum. Too much swap usage is going to kill performance over time. As far as CPU, what does the standard server load look like?