I run dnstools.ws which lets you perform DNS lookups, pings, traceroutes, etc. from 25 locations around the world. Each location is powered by a VPS running Debian, running a C# service that’s compiled to native code ahead-of-time using Native AOT. It uses ~60MB RAM.
Six of the the locations are powered by tiny “NAT VPSes” (native IPv6 with shared NAT IPv4) that only cost a few dollars a year, sponsored by various server providers. These usually have 256 MB RAM and 4-5 GB disk space.
This is great with OpenVZ and LXC. Since they’re containers that share the kernel with the host, kernel memory doesn’t count towards the container’s memory limit. I’m using ~75 MB RAM on those systems: ~60MB for the DNSTools worker and ~15MB for everything else (sshd, systemd, cron, rsyslogd, and unattended-upgrades). Plenty of room left.
I also have a few KVM systems with 256 MB RAM. These are what I’m struggling with.
Debian 13 (Trixie) increased the minimum hardware requirements from 256 MB to 512 MB RAM. It seems like this is a hard requirement - When running on a system using 256 MB RAM, the installer complains about having too little RAM, and OOMs during the installation. Even with a successful installation (e.g. upgrading from bookworm to trixie), it kernel panics on boot: “System is deadlocked on memory”.
I could try debootstrap to bootstrap a basic system, or Clonezilla to clone a working disk image over the network, but I think I’d hit the memory deadlock too.
Does Debian have smaller kernel images for VM environments, that use less RAM? Or should I just give up on Debian for this use case?
Does anyone have a recommendation for another distro I should use? I’ve been considering trying Alpine. C# does support compiling to use musl instead of glibc, so that’s not an issue. I’m also not tightly-coupled to systemd and can get rid of it.
I can mount a custom ISO on the systems, so booting from an ISO isn’t an issue.
Thanks!
Edit: Alpine looks very promising - no issue installing it and running my app on a 256MB VM. This is probably what I’ll end up using.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_Linux_distributions
heres a pretty good resource, bit of a tangent but i got a ton of shithouse computers with very low ram and i think alpine/postmarketos is the best choice. ive gotten kde, cosmic, and so on running on tons of terribly old computers with it, typically with no more than 1-2gb of ram. its also good for computers with only 256mb or so. after a certain point you need to just load your OS into ram entirely in order to have any ability to handle modern applications on very old hardware, in this case you should consider buying ram for your very old hardware (it comes cheap for the top compatible tech when its 90s hardware) if you like to use it as a sort of display piece for visitors to use. there are a couple of distros in that list that can handle being stored in ram. but obviously youre a bit different because you can just run it all on a vps. still probably best to go with alpine despite the operational differences
of the mainline fully featured modern desktop environments i feel cosmic de works the smoothest on old hardware, strangely enough.