Guest's picture

I am setting up a hosted dedicated server which uses virtual box to virtualise etc. One thing I am fairly short of is memory and I only have 512 mb to play with. I would be interested in peoples experience on how much much RAM they assign to their virtualised turnkey appliances...

Whats the least you have got away with :)

Forum: 
Liraz Siri's picture

Hey Tony, I'm one of the developers and I find that the true minimum memory requirements vary from appliance to appliance. You can get away with 128MB for most appliances, especially if you disable extra plug-ins/extensions (e.g., on Drupal) you don't use and such that gobble up memory.

The best way to find out what is truly the minimum is to start off really low (e.g., 64MB) and then gradually increase until things stop breaking and the performance is acceptable.

Note that allocating the bare minimum amount of memory will adversely effect performance as you won't be benefiting from in-memory disk caching and such. Anyhow, as always your results may vary. Best of luck and I hope you report back what you've learned!

Jeremy Davis's picture

My LAMP appliance is currently using just under 64MB. But it is not doing a lot at the moment. I haven't seen it use over 100MB even when its busy. I assume its a default setting of 400MB virtual memory and have never seen it use any. (All these figures were gained from the Webmin sidebar). I reckon you could get away with 64MB (but it'd probably need to use a bit of virtual), 128MB should be plenty.

Hope thats of some help :)

Add new comment