Just few months and I did not use xdebug on that server. To clarify it's was just CRUD app on Laravel with few small dependencies on top of it. Composer used like 700MB RAM to install it for whatever reason.

Just today, I had to resize the swap on a raspberry pi so composer could update the dependencies.

I've had fun issues recently where Composer crashed after hoovering up 1.5 GB of memory. (Composer sets that limit by itself on startup, I didn't arbitrarily choose that number.) XDebug was off. I fixed it by telling Composer to use unlimited memory.

I had to raise Composer’s RAM limit last week for a fairly simple Symfony project with less than 10 extra dependencies. I had to up it from 2 to 4 gigs. PHP 7.2.8. without xdebug.