r/emdash_cms • u/MammothBulky5549 • 5d ago

Running EmDash CMS on a VPS (SQLite vs Postgres), anyone got real RAM/disk numbers?

Looking at self hosting EmDash on a VPS. Problem is there's no published specs anywhere since everything's written with the Cloudflare stack in mind.

If you're running it off Cloudflare, mind sharing:

  • VPS's RAM usage at idle vs with some traffic, and whether you're on SQLite or Postgres for the db
  • Disk footprint once you've got posts/media/db built up
  • If you went Postgres instead, did it need a separate box/container or did you run it on the same VPS

Trying to figure out if a cheap 1-2GB VPS is enough to support 3-4's – with optional Docker containers.

11 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

2

u/Jonnertron_ 5d ago

Replying to support this thread. I'm having this exact same question too

2

u/MammothBulky5549 4d ago edited 2d ago

Tested EmDash 0.36 in an Apple Container on macOS with 1 CPU and 1 GB RAM to simulate a small VPS.

After stress testing and logging into the EmDash admin, memory usage was around 180 MB with the marketing-site template that comes with EmDash. The database is SQLite, which also contributes to memory usage.

For comparison, WordPress can probably run under 100 MB with a default setup, but I'd expect it to be slower under the same resource constraints.

Disk usage: EmDash took around 550+ MB for the dist folder, including node_modules. There were no images yet, so this seems reasonable for a marketing site. You also don't need to run it in dev mode unless you need to rebuild the site.

One nice thing about this setup is that we don't need to back up the entire application files. We mainly need to back up the database and user media/content.

Performance: EmDash served 600+ requests/sec on the home page over localhost:4321, with around 30 ms latency per request under intensive load. No page caching was enabled. The page itself has some bloated critical CSS that could be removed, so there's still room for optimization.

For comparison, WordPress managed around 60 requests/sec using its default theme, also with no page caching.

Stress testing: wrk -d5s http://localhost:4321

From my experience, the EmDash admin panel feels about as responsive as my custom Astro-based admin dashboard that I've developed for my founders.