Post #3222178
2026-05-27 05:47 UTC
You can get creative with Linux.
1. Install on 512mb, remove and trim system services, and lower the memory. Running KVM is by itself likely not going to let you do that, I suspect.
2. Use Alpine as you say.I run many alpine containers on between 25MB and 60MB, I give them 256MB, but it's way overkill.
Regarding alpine, be prepared to find differences from glibc and systemd distros in places you don't expect. PHP (god forbid you should need it) is a right mess on alpine. Mongodb will not work on alpine. Stuff like that.
I may take some challenge on this, but the tcpip stack seems faster on alpine than in debian, at least in my use cases.
Replies (2)
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@dan@upvote.au 2026-05-27 06:18
>PHP (god forbid you should need it) is a right mess on alpine. Mongodb will not work on alpine. Thankfully all I need is my app, Certbot, and a few standard utilities (ping, traceroute, mtr), and my app works fine with musl. Not a complex setup at all. The entire setup for the worker app is in this Ansible role: https://github.com/Daniel15/dnstools/blob/master/ansible/roles/dnstools-worker/tasks/main.yml
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@Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2026-05-27 09:46
I distantly remember installing PHP when using alpine Linux on a pinephone. It was like learning to install it from scratch. I have also completely forgotten the process since.