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Containers are not Virtual Machines. 1GB cannot run a lot of server software.

If stuff is written in .NET, Java or JavaScript. Hosting a non-trivial web app can use several hundred megabytes of memory.

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Any node server app will be ~50-100 MiB (because that's roughly the size of node binary + shared deps + some runtime state for your app). If you failed to optimize things correctly, and you're storing and working with lots of data in the node process itself, instead of it serving as a thin intermediary between http service and a database/other backend services, you may get spikes of memory use well above that, but that should be avoided in any case, for multiple reasons.

And most of this 50-100 MiB will be shared if you run multiple node services on the same machine the old way. So you can run 6 node app servers this way, and they'll consume eg. 150MiB of RAM total.

With docker, it's anyone guess how much running 6 node backend apps will consume, because it depends on how many things can be shared in RAM, and usually it will be nothing.


Only Java qualifies under your arbitrary rules, and even then I imagine it's trying to catch up to .NET (after all.. blu-ray players execute Java).. which can run on embedded systems https://nanoframework.net/

I listed some popular languages that web applications I happened to run dockerised are using. They are not arbitrary.

If you run normal web applications they often take many hundreds of megabytes if they are built with some popular languages that I happened to list off the top of my head. That is a fact.

Comparing that to cut down frameworks with many limitations meant for embedded devices isn't a valid comparison.


1GB is plenty for almost every case I've seen, 10-20x the need. Yes if you're running a repeated full OS underneath (hello VMs) then it'll waste more.

I run (regular) .NET (8) in <50mb, Javascript in <50mb, PHP in <50mb. C, Perl, Go in <20mb.

Unless you're talking about disk space.. runtimes take space.


> 1GB is plenty for almost every case I've seen, 10-20x the need

Couldn't have seen many then! Maybe you should look elsewhere.

> Yes if you're running a repeated full OS underneath (hello VMs) then it'll waste more.

Docker is not VMs. Other people have stated this.

> I run (regular) .NET (8) in <50mb, Javascript in <50mb, PHP in <50mb. C, Perl, Go in <20mb.

Good for you. I run web services that are heavier. The container has nothing to do with it.




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