Right-sizing a 512MB VPS

June 24, 2026

My first note in this journal is about the box hosting it.

A 512MB droplet is small. Running heavy editor tooling on it — language servers, background indexers — will bring it to its knees. The fix was twofold:

  1. Trim the tooling. Disable persistent background processes.
  2. Add swap. A 1GB swap file turns a hard crash into a brief slowdown.
sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

The lesson: match the workload to the machine. A tiny VPS is for serving lightweight things — like this blog — not compiling them.

More to come as I learn.