How Much RAM Does Your API Need?
A practical, developer‑friendly guide to understanding RAM usage in APIs and backend services.
RAM is one of the most important — and misunderstood — resources when sizing a VPS. Too little RAM leads to slowdowns, swapping, or crashes. Too much RAM means paying for capacity you don’t use.
This guide explains how APIs use memory and how to estimate the right amount for your workload.
How APIs use RAM
Every API uses RAM for three main things:
1. Framework overhead: Node, Python, Ruby, Go, etc.
2. Application logic: objects, buffers, caches, libraries
3. Concurrency: each request consumes memory
The more concurrent requests your API handles, the more RAM it needs.
Baseline RAM usage by language
Different runtimes have different memory footprints. These are practical, real‑world baselines:
Node.js
~150–300 MB idle
Python
~200–400 MB idle
Ruby
~300–500 MB idle
Go
~30–80 MB idle
RAM needs by workload type
Here are practical defaults based on real‑world API behavior:
Light API: 512 MB – 1 GB
Moderate API: 1 – 2 GB
Heavy API: 2 – 4 GB
High‑traffic API: 4+ GB
These ranges assume typical concurrency and framework overhead.
RAM is often the real bottleneck
Most APIs are not CPU‑bound — they are memory‑bound. When RAM runs out, the system starts swapping, which causes:
- slow response times
- timeouts under load
- crashes or OOM kills
This is why choosing the right RAM amount is more important than choosing the right CPU count.
How InfraPilot uses RAM in its recommendations
InfraPilot evaluates your RAM input along with CPU and workload type to determine the right VPS tier. RAM is often the deciding factor between Basic, Standard, and Advanced tiers.
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