Before was running on the cheapest model (1 core / 1GB mem / 30GB storage) at $12/month. The machine was running pretty low on memory, causing it to start swapping, which in turn caused the cpu to get too busy, and everything to slow down.
Now it has a whopping 2GB of memory, and things seem to have calmed down - cpu is back to around 10-15% usage, and swap is down to 0. Happy times all around.
Because of the amount of subs being archived, it now takes about 15 minutes between updates for each sub (was 18 before I updated the VM).
I'm planning to build some kind of scoring system, based on the amount of posts per subreddit (per day?), and amount of subscribers on the lemmy community. That way communities with little subscribers or that don't see many posts per day, will only be updated once per hour.
At the same time, I feel that subs like AskReddit, OutOfTheLoop and other "question-based" subreddits shouldn't be archived by Lemmit. In my opinion those kind of posts are useless without those answers, but please let me know if you disagree.