[PDM 1.1.7] What is the recommended RAM configuration (4 GiB) based on? How does RAM usage scale?

[SInisterPisces]

Ref: https://pdm.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html

Minimum Server Requirements, for Evaluation​

These minimum requirements are for evaluation purposes only and should not be used in production.

• CPU: 64bit (x86-64 or AMD64), 1+ Cores
• Memory (RAM): 1 GiB RAM
• Hard drive: more than 10 GB of space.
• Network card (NIC)

Recommended Server System Requirements​

• CPU: Modern AMD or Intel 64-bit based CPU, with at least 2 cores
• Memory: minimum 4 GiB for the OS.
• OS storage:
  • 40 GB, or more, free storage space
  • Use a hardware RAID with battery protected write cache (BBU) or a redundant ZFS setup (ZFS isnot compatible with a hardware RAID controller).
• Redundant Multi-GBit/s network interface cards (NICs)

The above recommends "minimum 4 GiB for the OS."
I installed the OS on to an ext4-formatted disk.

With one (1) single-node Remote added to PDM, I'm seeing ~ 415 MiB of RAM usage. That's about 10 percent of the total recommended RAM, and I'm well within the minimum requirements.

Question: What makes RAM usage scale up? Is it predictable by number Remotes/nodes-of-Remotes added? Some other indicator?
I'm trying to figure out if there's any way to predict actual RAM usage when setting up PDM.

 

[dcsapak]

from another post from me:

Post in thread 'On Limitations and Maximums'

Jan 30, 2026

there are no artifical limits in pdm itself, so the only limit is what the system can give.

mostly this is
* network latency/throughput (e.g. for remotes with many vms updating the metrics, etc. can be quite large)
* memory: from what i can remember a single resource with metrics (e.g. a vm/node/container/etc.) uses about ~1MiB memory, so 5000 vms would require about 5GiB of memory, but i'm actually not sure if this still is the case, so don't quote me on that
* for disk, i guess about the same is true, probably a bit more since there is additional data on disk vs memory (task logs...

• dcsapak

• 

so currently there is a memory requirement of ~1MiB per resource + some overhead for the base system
there is also the disk space required for rrd/task data of course