New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Arch, Open Suse mimimal versions. Which uses less RAM?
teochristian
Member
in Help
Hello!
I want to build a server and I need it to be really lightweight (low resource usage). Which of the following fresh minimal installations uses less RAM (&CPU)?
Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Arch, Open Suse (maybe other recomandations)
Thank you!
Comments
Probably Debian
If You need most lightweight os use Gentoo
Your choice of OS shouldn't be based on its initial RAM usage
Debian, thx.
Just use Debian stable.
Debian
Devuan. Pretty sure systemd isn't only a complete piece of shit but also wastes your RAM.
FreeBSD or OpenBSD?
a) a 32-bit version
b) If you want reasonable advice (as opposed to yet another nonsensical "what's your favourite colour? Just drop a name" social event) you need to tell us more
c) a kernel version x.y.z will use roughly the same amount of resources no matter the distro. Same goes for software, say nginx.
more important is memory management
I think most are the same, unless you are optimizing for a VPS with 256mb or less. I think convenience is more important than over optimizing few MBs of RAM.
Maybe alpine?
OpenBSD, NetBSD, Void, Gentoo, or Devuan.
I've moved my webserver over to Devuan because Linux is just easier to live in with that, and LE plays nice. I've got a few active 64MB KVMs running services under OpenBSD. You can't even boot many things with RAM that low with that these days.
If you really want minimal, I would say Alpine. OpenWRT is also minimal - but it's primarily targeted at routers.
Debian!
OpenWRT/LEDE x86 is, well, kind of abysmal for use as much more than that.
https://www.ramhost.us/?page=kvm-os-requirements
I'm running Debian minimal and teamspeak and I use like 60Mb of memory
I'm running Debian minimal and teamspeak and I use like 60Mb of memory
Make that 120MB.
I have always preferred CentOS to Debian. With both using systemd now I find myself liking Debian 9 quite a bit. It definitely uses less memory.
Debian is most lightweight distro among the distros you mentioned, however they all heavy distros. if you want to go minimal, you may want to look at this list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-weight_Linux_distribution
or use OpenBSD/FreeBSD
Windows Server 2016EDIT: I meant OpenBSD.
Just looked at a box running 32-bit OpenBSD 6.2. 11M in use, ntpd, sshd, syslogd, pflogd, and cron running, plus a init and a ksh for moi. If I took care to turn of slaacd, sndiod, and other things I could easily get it under 10M. However, typically I'm running smtpd which adds another 5M. What a pig!
The box has 2GB of RAM, so I think I have enough head room for now, but I watch it closely.
So, can anybody here beat that?
This one is from Virmach 3$/y running centos 6.9 32bit. I Have 2 eggdrops, syslogd vnstatd crond and sshd.
It's also OpenVZ, so the entire kernel isn't consuming your memory space. So, nice orange.
Debain if me.