Hello!

I run dnstools.ws which lets you perform DNS lookups, pings, traceroutes, etc. from 25 locations around the world. Each location is powered by a VPS running Debian, running a C# service that's compiled to native code ahead-of-time using Native AOT. It uses ~60MB RAM.

Six of the the locations are powered by tiny "NAT VPSes" (native IPv6 with shared NAT IPv4) that only cost a few dollars a year, sponsored by various server providers. These usually have 256 MB RAM and 4-5 GB disk space.

This is great with OpenVZ and LXC. Since they're containers that share the kernel with the host, kernel memory doesn't count towards the container's memory limit. I'm using ~75 MB RAM on those systems: ~60MB for the DNSTools worker and ~15MB for everything else (sshd, systemd, cron, rsyslogd, and unattended-upgrades). Plenty of room left.

I also have a few KVM systems with 256 MB RAM. These are what I'm struggling with.

Debian 13 (Trixie) increased the minimum hardware requirements from 🔗256 MB to 🔗512 MB RAM. It seems like this is a hard requirement - When running on a system using 256 MB RAM, the installer complains about having too little RAM, and OOMs during the installation. Even with a successful installation (e.g. upgrading from bookworm to trixie), it kernel panics on boot: "System is deadlocked on memory".

I could try debootstrap to bootstrap a basic system, or Clonezilla to clone a working disk image over the network, but I think I'd hit the memory deadlock too.

Does Debian have smaller kernel images for VM environments, that use less RAM? Or should I just give up on Debian for this use case?

Does anyone have a recommendation for another distro I should use? I've been considering trying Alpine. C# does support compiling to use musl instead of glibc, so that's not an issue. I'm also not tightly-coupled to systemd and can get rid of it.

I can mount a custom ISO on the systems, so booting from an ISO isn't an issue.

Thanks!

Edit: Alpine looks very promising - no issue installing it and running my app on a 256MB VM. This is probably what I'll end up using.

30-05-2026 16:50:18