Posted: May 16, 2018 at 2:39 am
Hello again, This year, we are going to be installing some WIFI for our annual beer festival in to our tent-in-the-field and we are planning to buy 25GB of data. We are going to connect to the wifi so that we can run barcode scanners and the ticketing app. We plan to scan up to 5,000 tickets. Please could you tell me 1) whether 25GB would be enough data to enable us to scan 5000 tickets successfully? Or do we need more? Could you give me a sense of how much data it up/down loaded for each scan? 2) is there anything I need to check up or tune on the server so that there is enough memory? Where would I find this setting? Thank you. Dee |
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Hi Dee, I did some checking and the app requests about 130kb when it requests the registration list, and when it requests a check in record 2kb. With regards to the server, we recommend upgrading to PHP 7 if that’s possible. The PHP version may or may not be available as a setting within your web hosting account. Also, it may help to upgrade the server to a plan where more resources are available (depending on what’s currently available from your web host). For example, Digital Ocean has a number of tiers available for their droplets: |
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Thanks Josh for the reply about the amount of data downloaded. I think we’ll have enough with 25GB. The website is with WPEngine. They say, when I asked them, that “on a shared server, memory is allocated through the server, your one site isn’t allocated a specific memory limit. Your site is provided the amount of memory it needs to be able to run efficiently.” Which seems to be a nice diplomatic answer, but doesn’t actually tell us much. WP Engine tell me that, within wp_config these are the max settings they will take; Should I increase the current settings in wp_config to match these? This seems to be a different magnitude of order from the 4GB you were talking about on the digital ocean pricing page. Must be a different thing … Thanks for your help. |
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Hi Dee, I think you should be fine but if you experience any slowness issues, then try increasing the memory limit to 512M. |
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On a shared server you have one server with multiple sites, each of those sites all share the resources available on that server so when you set the site to have 512MB of memory, you’re basically saying allow this site to go up to 512MB of available memory. If it’s not available as another site is already using some of it, you don’t get it. Similar situation with the database, each site makes connections to MySQL which has to handle those connections, retrieve the data and send it back and so. The more connections or more data being pulled the longer your wait for your ‘turn’. Shared servers are fine for low traffic/low resource sites but not great for ecommerce.
You can, but that doesn’t mean you’ll actually get 512MB of RAM because its available ram, shared between all sites.
It is a different thing, Digital Ocean ‘droplets’ are VPS. A VSP is still a shared server but done in a very different way, your shared instance on the server has its own allocation of RAM specifically for it. So you may have a site with 32GB of RAM and then you can have 8 VPS’s on that server (8 x 4GB is 32GB). Your VPS always has those 4GB’s available to it and doesn’t share that with others…. the trade off with Digital Oceon is YOU now manage your own server. If that’s not something you are prepared for you can find managed VPS packages that may be better (though they are much more expensive than DO or shared hosting). |
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Further to Tony’s comments above, there are options like ServerPilot where they help manage your Digital Ocean droplet. |
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Hi Josh, Tony & Seth Thanks all for your help & explanations. All understood & will monitor going forward. So far, all is well. Dee |
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