How to Choose VPS Core Count for Solana Applications: Ensuring Sufficient Resources Without Sacrificing Performance
How to Choose VPS Core Count for Solana Applications: Ensuring Sufficient Resources Without Sacrificing Performance
When developing or operating on Solana, the choice of VPS directly affects day-to-day stability and cost. Especially when covering multiple regions, maximizing cost efficiency per VPS allows broader coverage. However, cutting resources too much and falling into a state where latency or instability prevents achieving your goals would be self-defeating. The challenge is to keep costs down while not sacrificing performance. So how should you choose the number of VPS cores? This article explains the key considerations.
The Basic Principle of Server Utilization
First of all, CPU, memory, and storage utilization all have “limits.” Just like a human cannot sprint indefinitely, a server cannot sustain operation under excessively high utilization. Running at 90% or more inevitably leads to heat and overload, causing performance drops and eventually shutdowns. Conversely, leaving headroom allows both stability and speed to be maintained.
A practical reference for utilization thresholds is as follows:
| Utilization Level | State Image | Impact on Performance |
|---|---|---|
| up to 30% | Comfort Zone | Most stable, consistently delivering high performance |
| up to 60% | Acceptable | Slightly reduced performance but stable operation possible |
| up to 80% | Risk Zone | Significant performance drop, spikes may cause crashes |
| 80% and above | Critical Zone | High risk of shutdown due to heat or overload |
Large-scale cloud providers such as AWS also acknowledge that these 30% / 60% / 80% thresholds exist in practice. For workloads like Solana applications that require low latency, it is safest to aim to keep utilization at 30% or less.
How to Think About Core Count
So how should you decide on the number of cores? Simply concluding “utilization is low, so 2 cores are enough” can be risky. Tools like
htop may show high idle percentages or workloads appearing to use only 2 cores. However, behind the scenes, OS tasks such as systemd and other management processes are also running, competing with your application for resources. If you push 2 cores of workload into a 2-core environment, there will be no room for the OS tasks, resulting in excessive context switches, degraded performance, and instability.CPUs are designed to be smart, switching execution in sequence to “make it look like” multiple tasks run simultaneously. But this is only apparent behavior: every switch has overhead. Just like humans lose efficiency when multitasking, CPUs deliver maximum performance when focused on a single task.
Therefore, the ideal is to always leave half the resources as headroom. If you expect a 2-core workload, choose a 4-core VPS. For a 4-core workload, choose 8 cores. This buffer directly leads to both stability and speed. Dividing VPS by workload unit is also effective: giving CPUs the same type of work repeatedly maximizes performance.
Flexible Decisions Based on Workload
Still, the optimal answer always depends on your workload. The type of application and traffic patterns can drastically change core requirements. That is why you should first observe your usage with
htop to see how much CPU and memory your application actually consumes. Even if it looks idle, the OS is working in the background, and short observations can be misleading. Continuous monitoring is important to understand trends.If you are unsure, please open a support ticket in the Validators DAO official Discord. Sharing an
htop screenshot allows us to provide specific advice based on your real usage. Giving a fixed “recommended core count” would be unhelpful, but advice based on actual data makes it possible to find the best balance between cost and performance.- Validators DAO Official Discord: https://discord.gg/C7ZQSrCkYR
VPS Product Lineup and Choice Axis
Our ERPC lineup includes VPS options focused on cost efficiency, and Premium Ryzen VPS aimed at maximum performance. Premium Ryzen VPS offers a 5.7GHz high-clock CPU, ECC DDR5 memory, NVMe4 storage, and dual 25Gbps networking. With a design that never over-commits resources, it delivers bare-metal class performance despite being virtualized. Standard VPS, on the other hand, is suited for more affordable multi-region deployments. Choose based on whether cost efficiency or top performance is your priority.
Issues Solved by ERPC and Validators DAO
- Transaction failures and latency fluctuations common in RPC environments
- Performance restrictions imposed by many infrastructure providers
- Strong impact of network distance on communication quality
- Difficulty for smaller projects to access high-quality infrastructure
While building the open-source Solana NFT card game project Epics DAO, we faced the challenge that high-quality, high-speed Solana development environments were not easily available. In response, we built our own platform, and based on this expertise we now provide ERPC and SLV.
Financial applications in particular are mission-critical, where latency or errors directly affect user experience. With Solana’s distributed validators and Web3-specific mechanisms overlapping, it is difficult to grasp the whole picture, and many projects have struggled with instability and delays.
We aim to provide the high-performance development foundation that is truly needed, contributing to both developer experience and user experience across the Solana ecosystem. Both ERPC and SLV are positioned as part of this mission.
- ERPC Official Website: https://erpc.global/en
- SLV Official Website: https://slv.dev/en
- elSOL Official Website: https://elsol.app/en
- Epics DAO Official Website: https://epics.dev/en
- Validators DAO Official Discord: https://discord.gg/C7ZQSrCkYR
