RAM requirements for small dataset

I’d like to use couchbase for a number of the reasons, but the memory recommendations seem quite high. If I have a 500MB dataset with a fifth of that the working set, is it really necessary to have 16GB nodes? Plus another 2GB for XDCR? Or are those just sort of baseline numbers?

Hi Alex, how did you obtain the 16GB and the 2GB?
thanks
-cihan

Hi Cihan,

This doc specifies:

The following hardware requirements are recommended for installation: 

...

16GB RAM (physical)

...

A minimum specification machine should have the following characteristics:

4GB RAM (physical)

The 2GB for XDCR comment came from this blog post:

I’ll take separate looks at the “source” and “destination” cluster requirements for XDCR ... It will vary a bit based on how many buckets (and replication streams) but a good estimate is to leave about 2GB of RAM free per node above and beyond what is needed to hold the data.

If I could reliably run a production cluster with a half gig to a gig of data on 2GB boxes (or 4GB boxes) I’d be pretty happy. 16GB seems crazy over the top for that amount of data.