How much memory do I need?  When do I need more?

Many people ask for the bare minimum on servers and usually end up shooting themselves in the foot.  Just like if you went to Home Depot to buy a gallon of paint and you opted for the $2.00 can rather than the $4.00 can because you'd save a few dollars, six months later you'll be scraping the walls and re-painting.  Save yourself the extra trouble and invest in quality goods!

For the most part many systems will work just fine with 1 GB of memory, but in an eCommerce site, especially those running X-Cart Gold, X-Cart Pro and LiteCommerce, we highly recommend 2 GB.

The more memory you can put on the server the better the performance. X-Cart LOVES memory. The more you have, the more it uses, and rightly so. Think of a boat as your server, the lower deck being the database and a bucket as memory. Every time someone requests something from the database you spring a leak in the boat, so you run down the stairs with bucket in hand and then run back up to the top deck and throw out the water to the ocean (web). But you're only one guy with one bucket, and now there's 10 holes in the boat. The bigger the bucket (or multiple buckets, the more water you can dump out.

Remember that EVERY request to the server is going through the memory. It must first get the data, store it in memory and then display to the web. If you run out of memory, processes take longer to finish. If there are too many requests, then the server slows down and when it gets REALLY bad it crashes (your boat just sank).