I measured the idle RAM of 19 self-hosted apps on identical hardware so you can size a VPS without guessing

[smallserverdata@lemmy.ml]

Every time someone asks "will this run on a 1 GB VPS?" the answer is a guess, or a vendor minimum that was written to be safe rather than accurate. So I measured it.

Same box, same method, every app: install, start it, let it settle for 60s at idle with no clients connected, then sum the RSS of the whole process tree. No Docker overhead in the numbers — these are the apps themselves.

App	Idle RSS	Version
File Browser	16 MB	2.31.2
Gotify	20 MB	2.6.1
ntfy	27 MB	2.11.0
PocketBase	31 MB	0.22.21
Beszel	39 MB	0.9.1
Caddy	40 MB	2.8.4
Navidrome	47 MB	0.63.2
Syncthing	57 MB	2.1.3
Prometheus	70 MB	2.53.2
MinIO	132 MB	2024 release
Uptime Kuma	136 MB	2.5.0
Gitea	158 MB	1.24.4
Grafana	172 MB	11.2.0
Forgejo	173 MB	7.0.9
Prowlarr	188 MB	2.5.2.5491
code-server	191 MB	4.131.0
Lidarr	191 MB	3.1.0.4875
Radarr	192 MB	6.3.0.10514
Sonarr	193 MB	4.0.19.2979

Things I did not expect:

• The *arr apps are all the same size. Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr and Prowlarr land within 5 MB of each other (188–193 MB). That is not a coincidence and it is not the app — it is the .NET runtime setting the floor. Which also means the folklore of "budget ~2 GB for an *arr stack" is roughly right, and I say that as someone who started this expecting to debunk it.
• Go binaries are absurdly cheap. File Browser, Gotify, ntfy, PocketBase, Caddy and Navidrome together idle at about 181 MB — less than one Sonarr.
• Grafana's 512 MB minimum is honest. At 172 MB idle it has real headroom needs once dashboards start querying. Not every vendor minimum is padding.
• Node apps cost you. Uptime Kuma at 136 MB is ~8x File Browser for a job that is not 8x harder.

Caveats, because they matter: this is idle RSS, not what you need under load. Databases, media transcoding and indexing all blow past these numbers. Treat it as the floor, not the budget. My own rule of thumb from this: sum the idle figures, add ~300 MB for the OS, then add 30% headroom — that has matched what actually fits so far.

Raw data is free under CC BY 4.0 (CSV and JSON), plus per-app pages with the exact commands used so you can reproduce or dispute any number:

https://smeltworks.com/smallserver/

CSV direct: https://smeltworks.com/smallserver/smallserver-dataset.csv

Happy to take corrections — if a number looks wrong for your setup I would rather fix it than defend it. Also taking requests for what to measure next; Jellyfin and Immich are the two I keep getting asked for.