How much RAM does MinIO need? We measured: 132 MB idle
MinIO (s3-compatible object storage) used 132 MB of RAM across 1 process sitting idle with default configuration — measured by us, on real hardware, not copied from another blog. Runtime: Single Go binary
The heaviest app in this batch. Fine on a 1 GB box for personal object storage; do not co-host it with Prometheus on 1 GB.
What the vendors say
MinIO's production hardware guide asks for 32 GB or more per node. That guidance is for erasure-coded, multi-node, high-throughput clusters — not the single-node bucket most self-hosters actually deploy.
What changes under load
132 MB is a single-node server with empty buckets. Throughput-heavy workloads buffer in memory, and multi-drive erasure coding raises the floor substantially. The vendor number is not wrong, it just answers a different question.
Methodology
Each app was started with its default configuration and an empty data directory, left to settle for 25–30 seconds, and confirmed alive with an HTTP request to its web interface. We then recorded the resident set size (RSS) of the app's entire process tree via ps. Apps were run directly on the host (no Docker), so numbers exclude container overhead (~10–30 MB with Docker).
A fresh minimal Ubuntu 24.04 VPS typically idles at roughly 200–300 MB RSS (kernel, systemd, sshd, journald). All 'fits on' verdicts below assume ~300 MB reserved for the OS.
Where to run it
A 1 GB instance from Hetzner, Vultr or DigitalOcean covers this app with the OS overhead included. Don't pay for RAM the measurements say you won't use.
Other apps we measured
File Browser (16 MB), Gotify (20 MB), ntfy (27 MB), PocketBase (31 MB), Caddy (40 MB), Navidrome (47 MB), Syncthing (57 MB), Prometheus (70 MB), Uptime Kuma (136 MB), Gitea (158 MB), Forgejo (173 MB), code-server (VS Code in the browser) (191 MB)