Hardware recommendations

Software Support
1

Hi,
recently I installed OJS3.0beta1 on my workstation. Now I would like to install it to a dedicated server for using it at the university but can’t find any recommendations for the hardware. What would you recommend for number of cpu’s/cores and the amount of RAM? What are you using in your production systems.
Best,
Andreas

2

Hi @henkel,

There aren’t specific guidelines for OJS 3.0 yet – but generally there are no specific requirements, and the server resources will depend heavily on the level of traffic. Note that OJS 3.0 isn’t yet ready for production use; we’ll be releasing the production version of OJS 3.0 next year, hopefully sooner than later.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Dear Alec,

Thanks for your quick reply. I’m aware of the fact theta OJS 3 is not yet released as production version. Since I’ll need it for production use in the middle of next year that is fine for me.
Maybe you provide me with the hardware requirements/recommendations for OJS 2.x? Would 2 cores be enough or should it be more like 4 cores? At the moment it’s planned to host 1 or 2 journals - one of them is a yearly report, the other one not yet decide. Since it’s running fairly ok on my workstation I would tend to use a virtual machine with 2 cores and 4 GB of RAM. Would that be enough from your experience?

Best regards,
Andreas

4

Hi @henkel,

That sounds fine. For OJS 2.x, the hardware requirements are very dependent on load and the amount of content. As long as you’re running a PHP opcode cache (e.g. XCache, Zend Optimizer, etc.) and using a filesystem other than NTFS (which reportedly behaves slowly with file caching), you’ll likely find that OJS is database-limited; if your current deployment isn’t enough, you could boost performance by moving the database to a separate machine.

At SFU we tend to host in a virtualized environment and have many installations of OJS going per VM; as a VM starts to exhibit load we scale onto new VMs. And I’m not too familiar with the host level infrastructure, but it’s nothing too extravagant. It’s quite reliable.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team