toolchest_

Measured on a real homelab

Netdata RAM & CPU requirements (measured)

On our homelab it uses about 277 MB of RAM on a normal hour, 312 MB in busy hours, and peaked at 386 MB over the last 30 days (monitoring one host: ~11,700 metrics).

What it really uses (process memory)

Typical (median)
277 MB
Average
280 MB
Busy hours (95th percentile)
312 MB
Highest recorded
386 MB
As docker stats shows it (with disk cache)
median 355 MB · peak 566 MB
Window
720 hours measured, up to Sep 26, 2026
Version
2.11.1
Stack (all summed)
netdata
Workload
monitoring one host: ~11,700 metrics
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
100 MB
Recommended RAM
200 MB

100-200 MB by default, depending on how many metrics are collected (about 16 KiB per metric + 32 MiB of caches).

Sources

What makes it grow

Memory grows with the number of metrics collected (about 16 KiB each, per the official docs). With ~11,700 metrics that formula gives ~215 MB; its processes averaged 280 MB and peaked at 386 MB (docker stats shows up to 566 MB with disk cache), so the resource calculator recommends 768 MB. Disk depends on how much history you keep.

Sizing it

Our rule of thumb: plan for the highest process memory recorded plus 25% headroom: 512 MB. Our workload is small — scale it with the factors above before buying hardware.

Combine it with other apps in the resource calculator →

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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