2GB Burst?

[FrankSpencer]

The larger VPS package has a normal 1GB of memory available, but in brackets 2GB burst. Does this mean that when your traffic increases you can occasionally use more? How does that work?

[dave]

That is Burst Ram which means that you can spike to higher than your standard plan levels if the ram is available on the node. We dont overload our nodes so there is usually a good amount of burst ram available to people to utilize when they need it.

It really makes sense for people who wont need it all the time but dont want to fall short when an application spins off a demanding task.

[FrankSpencer]

Has there ever been a time when there wasn't the RAM available? If that were to occur, what would happen? Would all of the sites hosted on that server run slow?

[dave]

Burst ram is only available to customers with a burst package and it does not affect the performance of other sites.

If there only is 500mb of burst ram available and your vps needs it then it uses it.
If there is 0mb of burst ram available then it keeps checking every second so that it can grab some when it becomes available.

Burst ram is allocating on the fly for each process very quickly by the system.