Measured on a real homelab
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).
100-200 MB by default, depending on how many metrics are collected (about 16 KiB per metric + 32 MiB of caches).
Sources
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.
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 →
Build it: Rent a VPS · Buy a mini-PC
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.