Measured on a real homelab
On our homelab it uses about 85 MB of RAM on a normal hour, 143 MB in busy hours, and peaked at 468 MB over the last 30 days (small library: 9 video files (94 GB)).
8 GB recommended for the average deployment; 4 GB may be enough on a Linux server without a GUI.
Sources
Each additional concurrent transcoding stream significantly increases CPU/GPU and RAM usage; 4K streams and subtitle burning are especially demanding.
Our rule of thumb: plan for the highest process memory recorded plus 25% headroom: 640 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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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.