$15 is not exactly zero, is it? If you don't need more than 1GB, why pay anything for more than 1GB?

I recall running LAMP stacks on something like 128MB about 20 years ago and not really having problems with memory. Most current website backends are not really much more complicated than they were back then if you don't haul in bloat.

NVME read latency is around 100usec, a SQLite3 database in the low terabytes needs somewhere between 3-5 random IOs per point lookup, so you're talking worst case for an already meaningful amount of data about 0.5ms per cold lookup. Say your app is complex and makes 10 of these per request, 5 ms. That leaves you serving 200 requests/sec before ever needing any kind of cache.

That's 17 million hits per day in about 3.9 MiB/sec sustained disk IO, before factoring in the parallelism that almost any bargain bucket NVME drive already offers (allowing you to at least 4x these numbers). But already you're talking about quadrupling the infrastructure spend before serving a single request, which is the entire point of the article.

    # ioping -R /dev/sda

    --- /dev/sda (block device 38.1 GiB) ioping statistics ---
    22.7 k requests completed in 2.96 s, 88.8 MiB read, 7.68 k iops, 30.0 MiB/s
    generated 22.7 k requests in 3.00 s, 88.8 MiB, 7.58 k iops, 29.6 MiB/s
    min/avg/max/mdev = 72.2 us / 130.2 us / 2.53 ms / 75.6 us

> There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM

There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, and instead to focus on generating business value to customers and getting more paying customers. I think it’s what many engineers are keen to overlook behind fun technical details.

Or better yet, go with a euro provider like Hetzner and get 8GB of RAM for $10 or so. :)

Even their $5 plan gives 4GB.

I think we have to re-think and re-evaluate RAM usage on modern systems that use swapping with CPU-assisted page compression and fast, modern NVMe drives.

The Macbook Neo with 8GB RAM is a showcase of how people underistimated its capabilities due to low amount of RAM before launch, yet after release all the reviewers point to a larger set of capabilities without any issues that people didn't predict pre-launch.

It doesn't look like they think about how to make it fit though. They just use a known good go template

Hetzner, OVH and others offer 4-8gb and 2-4 cores for the same ~5$