Shrinking NixOS RAM footprint and resource requirements to the bare minimum

Re:Shrinking NixOS RAM footprint and resource requirements t... by LaurensBER on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:47AM (#50349587)

I'm running an [OpenStick](https://github.com/OpenStick/OpenStick) next to my Kubernetes cluster for fun and there's actually a lot of useful software that runs great with a limited amount of ram.

Some of my favourites are:

[Zeroclaw](https://github.com/zeroclaw-labs/zeroclaw) - 3 MB RSS when idle!

[Beszel](https://github.com/henrygd/beszel) - 10 MB agent + 10 MB server

[Gatus](https://github.com/TwiN/gatus) - 10 MB

[Fusion RSS](https://github.com/0x2E/fusion) - 22 MB

[Adguard Home](https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/) - 40 MB

[Shiori](https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori) - 10 MB

You won't be able to run all of this on a 128 MB ram VPS but I bet you can run 1-2 services easily!

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Re:Shrinking NixOS RAM footprint and resource requirements t... by wrxd on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:37AM (#50349893)

Absolutely. There are many lightweight services that would fit. The rule of thumb is to look for something written in a native language that doesn't need to process a huge amount of data.

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Re:Shrinking NixOS RAM footprint and resource requirements t... by Telemakhos on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:58AM (#50350428)

In college I had a laptop with eight megabytes of RAM. It ran Windows 3.11, including a full office suite (Ami Pro, Lotus 123, etc) and web browsers, USENET readers, mIRC, all in 8MB. It also ran an html server and ftp server as background processes. Today it couldn’t even run the RSS reader in that list.

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Re:Shrinking NixOS RAM footprint and resource requirements t... by lmz on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:51AM (#50352728)

Pointers were smaller back then.

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