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Measured on a real homelab

Coolify RAM & CPU requirements (measured)

On our homelab it uses about 117 MB of RAM on a normal hour, 223 MB in busy hours, and peaked at 334 MB over the last 30 days (managing 2 servers and ~35 apps and services).

What it really uses (process memory)

Typical (median)
117 MB
Average
135 MB
Busy hours (95th percentile)
223 MB
Highest recorded
334 MB
As docker stats shows it (with disk cache)
median 369 MB · peak 1.3 GB
Window
720 hours measured, up to Sep 26, 2026
Version
4.3.23
Stack (all summed)
coolify + PostgreSQL + Redis + realtime + Traefik proxy + sentinel
Workload
managing 2 servers and ~35 apps and services
Hardware
Intel i5-10600K · 23 GB RAM · Docker (Coolify)

Caveat (Oct 2, 2026): these figures count process memory held in RAM. When the server is under memory pressure, idle apps get part of their memory swapped out and it was not being counted, so the "typical" figure may be too low; the peak is reliable. We now measure RAM plus swap and will update these numbers.

What the project says

Minimum RAM
2 GB
Recommended RAM
not published
CPU cores
2

Minimum: 2 cores, 2 GB RAM, 10 GB free disk. It can technically start with 1 core and 512 MB, which is not recommended.

Sources

What makes it grow

Official minimum: 2 cores, 2 GB RAM and 10 GB of free disk (it can technically start with 1 core and 512 MB, which the docs advise against). That is for Coolify itself: every app you deploy adds its own RAM on top.

Sizing it

Our rule of thumb: plan for the highest process memory recorded plus 25% headroom: 448 MB. Our workload is small — scale it with the factors above before buying hardware.

Combine it with other apps in the resource calculator →

Build it: Rent a VPS · Buy a mini-PC

How we measure

Memory per container from Netdata on the same server, summed across the whole stack (app, database and cache) hour by hour. The main figures are the processes' own memory (anonymous memory: heap, stacks). The docker stats figure is higher because it also counts active disk cache — which Linux gives back when it needs it — and shared memory such as PostgreSQL's shared buffers. Hours where the main container had no data are left out, not counted as zero. Re-measured with a script, not by hand.

Other measured apps