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why so many providers have 1GB ram as main production?
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why so many providers have 1GB ram as main production?

sorry I am a developer so have this question. I don't know what can do for 1GB ram today.
Most modern compilers and frameworks (ruby, go, node, rust...) need 2GB+ ram to run.
And even some libraries can't be installed for less than 2GB ram (tensorflow, k8s etc).
So, how you guys use those 1GB box? with perl CGI?

Thanks.

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Comments

  • And if you use those data stacks from Apache (spark, hudi, drill etc) they will start from 4GB.

  • BTW, I did get a 1GB box from a special offer. I only use it to ping to my other servers for health monitoring. :)

  • brueggusbrueggus Member, IPv6 Advocate

    1GB is plenty of memory for most tasks. I don't compile on my VPS and don't use bloated frameworks. Rust binaries, for example, have a pretty small memory footprint.

    If you want to run a k8s cluster, a 1GB VPS is the wrong choice, obviously.

  • niknik Member, Host Rep

    I don't understand the question. Compile your Go project locally and run the binary on a VM, 1GB gets you really far with Go, Rust, and even Node.

    Thanked by 3yoursunny nick_ bdl
  • @nik said:
    I don't understand the question. Compile your Go project locally and run the binary on a VM, 1GB gets you really far with Go, Rust, and even Node.

    I only use cloud env for dev stuff.

  • Your question stupid.
    My answer will be even worst: because people (customers) need these plans.
    Questions?

  • emgemg Veteran

    This is all personal opinion, not absolute fact. Okay?

    This is LowEndTalk, where the basic VPS must be $7 or less. Providers compete on price, so they advertise a basic, low end system at a low price to attract customers. Currently that basic system is 1 GB, in my opinion.

    Anything less (say 500 or 750 MB) may drive customers away, because it gives the appearance of trying too hard to beat their competitors prices in an unfair way, offering oranges to compare with everyone else's apples. It feels like cheating.

    Those 1 GB offerings get customers to look at the provider's website. From there, customers refine their choices to fit what they actually need. The 1 GB offerings have become the "foot in the door."

    You're right, 1 GB is pretty limited. Geekbench 6 won't run on it, and it is part of YABS, a commonly cited benchmark here. I predict that someday in the future, we may see 2 GB offerings become the standard small VPS. Hopefully sooner than later.

    Repeating: That is merely a personal opinion.

    Thanked by 2highwinds sebkehl
  • WebProjectWebProject Host Rep, Veteran

    Your question is valid, some UK provider still do have 256Mb pans.

    This is a reason why our cheapest plan starts from 2GB of RAM 😂

    Thanked by 1highwinds
  • tjntjn Member

    You can do a lot on 1GB of RAM, in fact I've got plenty of VM's running production LEMP stacks for busy-ish websites - sure, nothing crazy but they all work really well.

  • cheap VMs are not meant for heavy dev work, heck I get scolded every once and awhile when I'm compiling a kernel on shared resources.

  • Why 1GB?

    Because for some of us even 512 Mb is enough.

    Thanked by 2chihcherng martheen
  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    Because a lot of software works with less, makes no sense paying for 2GB or more if you only need 1GB or less.

  • The answer - theses servers are generally for web servers, not development servers. ?? It's an interesting question because I, not being a pro developer, not once thought of using a remote machine as my main developing machine. Sure, some web apps suggest compiling or building a web app on one remote machine and then using that to install on a second, but that is, in my experience, not the usual. So, why are you looking at these 1GB RAM servers as potential development machines? VPS = virtual private server.

  • AXYZEAXYZE Member

    Xbox360 with 512MB that is shared with GPU ran freakin GTA:V with no problems.

    Standard CRUD? 2GB required.

    Dont you see issue here?

    0.7GB is just enough for Node.js(Express/Fastify), PHP, Java or ASP.NET apps.
    1GB gives some free space for database and linux page cache.

    Its enough for majority of projects.

    You are talking that 2GB is required.
    What do you have in this 1GB+ RAM that is taken by Go app?
    Cause I can assure you that production Go apps don't need to go that high with RAM usage. If they need 2GB then theres a lot of code there so CPU also works its ass - you likely need 2vCPU then. If CPU is idle but you use much RAM then you are likely wasting your RAM.

    But I also understand your point of view because in recent years nobody cares about optimisation. 1GB VPS is $4/mo, 2GB VPS is $6/ms. Who cares if your salary is several thousands $ per month?

    Computing power is super cheap, companies dont care, because programmer time is 500x more expensive.

    But here at LET majoroty of us are hobbyists and if you want to spend a little time optimising it you will save some bucks every month and have less envorimental impact. 1GB is just enough then.

  • bgerardbgerard Member
    edited March 2023

    @AXYZE said:
    Xbox360 with 512MB that is shared with GPU ran freakin GTA:V with no problems.

    Standard CRUD? 2GB required.

    Dont you see issue here?

    0.7GB is just enough for Node.js(Express/Fastify), PHP, Java or ASP.NET apps.
    1GB gives some free space for database and linux page cache.

    Its enough for majority of projects.

    You are talking that 2GB is required.
    What do you have in this 1GB+ RAM that is taken by Go app?
    Cause I can assure you that production Go apps don't need to go that high with RAM usage. If they need 2GB then theres a lot of code there so CPU also works its ass - you likely need 2vCPU then. If CPU is idle but you use much RAM then you are likely wasting your RAM.

    But I also understand your point of view because in recent years nobody cares about optimisation. 1GB VPS is $4/mo, 2GB VPS is $6/ms. Who cares if your salary is several thousands $ per month?

    Computing power is super cheap, companies dont care, because programmer time is 500x more expensive.

    But here at LET majoroty of us are hobbyists and if you want to spend a little time optimising it you will save some bucks every month and have less envorimental impact. 1GB is just enough then.

    You can get away with way less than 700mb for a lot of NodeJs express applications. You'd be looking at less than 150mb for a simple crud api. Obviously it you need to handle decent traffic you'd scale them horizontally and use more ram, but I start getting concerned when a single node processes is pushing >1.5gb heap. Unless you start talking about worker threads.

  • bgerardbgerard Member
    edited March 2023

    @scooke said:
    The answer - theses servers are generally for web servers, not development servers. ?? It's an interesting question because I, not being a pro developer, not once thought of using a remote machine as my main developing machine. Sure, some web apps suggest compiling or building a web app on one remote machine and then using that to install on a second, but that is, in my experience, not the usual. So, why are you looking at these 1GB RAM servers as potential development machines? VPS = virtual private server.

    It's becoming more and more common to see developers use remote machines as development environments, a lot of it stems from how easy it is to setup vscode remote development (jetbrains are getting there but still lagging behind by a large margin).

    You benefit from being able to connect via a local client or a browser, being able to scale up and down your dev machine in minutes, take snapshots should you need to restore the environment, generally a better Internet connection if you need to push images, pull down heap dumps etc

    I'm not a fan of the remote dev environment but it's increasingly popular

    Thanked by 2highwinds scooke
  • @highwinds said: Most modern compilers and frameworks (ruby, go, node, rust...) need 2GB+ ram to run.

    Absolutely not true. I run an anycast network with all the devops bells and whistles and our entire tech stack (terraform, nomad, runc containers + our webserver and more) runs great on < 512mb ram on Alpine.

  • @ehhthing said:

    @highwinds said: Most modern compilers and frameworks (ruby, go, node, rust...) need 2GB+ ram to run.

    Absolutely not true. I run an anycast network with all the devops bells and whistles and our entire tech stack (terraform, nomad, runc containers + our webserver and more) runs great on < 512mb ram on Alpine.

    Ooo +1 for nomad, underrated and doesn't get mentioned enough in favour of k8s

  • varwwwvarwww Member
    edited March 2023

    Compile locally and run the binaries only. Disable unwanted daemons like snapd and then you can use the 1GB RAM (upto some extent)

  • ralfralf Member
    edited March 2023

    @highwinds said:
    sorry I am a developer so have this question. I don't know what can do for 1GB ram today.
    Most modern compilers and frameworks (ruby, go, node, rust...) need 2GB+ ram to run.
    And even some libraries can't be installed for less than 2GB ram (tensorflow, k8s etc).
    So, how you guys use those 1GB box? with perl CGI?

    Thanks.

    Different people have different needs. Here's one of my live web back-end nodes:

    MiB Mem : 1981.2 total, 983.0 free, 197.1 used, 801.2 buff/cache
    MiB Swap: 1024.0 total, 1012.0 free, 12.0 used. 1612.3 avail Mem

    As you can see, it's only actually using 1GB with most of that as disk-cache for the sqlite DB, and would actually fit comfortably in 512MB.

  • AXYZEAXYZE Member

    @bgerard said:
    You can get away with way less than 700mb for a lot of NodeJs express applications. You'd be looking at less than 150mb for a simple crud api.

    Yes, but in context of VPS, OS also needs to be in ram and depending on choice it can be as low as 60MB and as high as 200MB. Then there is some peak memory usage when you are installing node_modules, updating your packages etc. so if you don't want to use SWAP, 0.7GB is just right. But yes, you can get by with even less RAM like you say! :) Especially if you are running very light OS like Alpine Linux or even Debian.

  • kendidkendid Veteran

    I have several 128Mb that still serve their purpose!

    Thanked by 1Mumbly
  • ericlsericls Member, Patron Provider

    Sorry you compile your code on production machine?

    Thanked by 3highwinds tjn bgerard
  • @ericls said:
    Sorry you compile your code on production machine?

    as I have said, I use cloud env as development stacks. I have been using GCP instance for dev for a long time.

  • LexLex Member
    edited March 2023

    All providers have machines bigger than 1GB, your question is about your own cheapness, not RAM quantity. But even then, I had numerous sales at 12-40$/year that had 2-4GB of RAM.

    If you put out more dollar, you'll get more RAM from ANY provider.

    I can use 1GB machines for a plethora of activities, even development (Python)

  • Why do you compile programe on VPS?

  • @highwinds said:

    @ericls said:
    Sorry you compile your code on production machine?

    as I have said, I use cloud env as development stacks. I have been using GCP instance for dev for a long time.

    That’s just your choice, you can just get a large dev server and be happy. More people don’t. They build and compile on their local machines. Some even have dedicated dev server in their basement. I’m a Rust developer, currently building on a headless mini PC I got for ~$400. I can’t imagine building my codes on a cloud server: Rust Analyzer will die if the source code is complex enough on 2GB of RAM. But for $400 I can get a nice box with 16GB or RAM (going to upgrade to 32GB since memory is getting cheaper here), can I get a comparable cloud server for one year with the same price? I don’t think so. So for me I’m saving quite some bucks each year. I have public IPv6 assigned at home so reachability is not a problem.

    So it turns out to personal choice. Not to mention many people don’t do dev stuff at all. IMO 512MB is enough for quite some people.

  • ericlsericls Member, Patron Provider

    @highwinds said:

    @ericls said:
    Sorry you compile your code on production machine?

    as I have said, I use cloud env as development stacks. I have been using GCP instance for dev for a long time.

    I see. Yes, then in that case it make sense to require larger machines, because dev work now requires a lot of ram and CPU power.

    However, many cloud instances are geared towards production use, and comes with features and tools to solve specific problems related to that. I think for dev, it would be better to get a home server or rent a dedicated server.

  • bgerardbgerard Member
    edited March 2023

    @AXYZE said:

    @bgerard said:
    You can get away with way less than 700mb for a lot of NodeJs express applications. You'd be looking at less than 150mb for a simple crud api.

    Yes, but in context of VPS, OS also needs to be in ram and depending on choice it can be as low as 60MB and as high as 200MB. Then there is some peak memory usage when you are installing node_modules, updating your packages etc. so if you don't want to use SWAP, 0.7GB is just right. But yes, you can get by with even less RAM like you say! :) Especially if you are running very light OS like Alpine Linux or even Debian.

    Although you would typically install deps as part of your CI process and package them with your deployable artifact, but yeah, I don't bother doing that for personal stuff and just buy more ram lol

  • defaultdefault Veteran
    edited March 2023

    Most consumers don't need more than 1GB of RAM, this is why most providers target this entry market. If a consumer needs more RAM, then most likely they have a successful project on their hands so they need to start investing for more computing power at that point anyway.

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