Alpine Linux 3.23 - 23mb ram | 71mb disk - guide

somik · March 16

@sshbox said:

@AnthonySmith said:
Browser with js support.

Is that even theoretically possible with 128 MB?

Ofcourse! As long as you dont open youtube

AnthonySmith · March 16

@sshbox said:

@AnthonySmith said:
Browser with js support.

Is that even theoretically possible with 128 MB?

I have an idea or 2 on how to do it

sshbox · March 16

  alert('Hello, World!');

It supports javascript!!!

AnthonySmith · March 16

@somik said:

@sshbox said:

@AnthonySmith said:
Browser with js support.

Is that even theoretically possible with 128 MB?

Ofcourse! As long as you dont open youtube

Well yeah

I did just see a video of someone running powerfox on a really bad G4 Mac playing YouTube fine, quite impressive.

brian · March 22

have you tried boot it up on 64mb ram vm?

AnthonySmith · March 22

@brian said:
have you tried boot it up on 64mb ram vm?

yep, backtogeek.com is actually running on a 64mb VPS now.

somik · March 22

Some people here running their public site on 64mb RAM while I'm running my private home server on 128GB DDR4 RAM...

AnthonySmith · March 22

@somik said:
Some people here running their public site on 64mb RAM while I'm running my private home server on 128GB DDR4 RAM...

Haha, well to be fair I have been spec'ing up a 1TB ram dual E5-2699v4 on eBay with a ton of spinners to have a local internet, software and repo cache and llm, because I think the internet as we know it is going in a very bad direction.

wankel · March 22

@AnthonySmith said: I think the internet as we know it is going in a very bad
direction. (... <>...) been spec'ing up a 1TB ram dual E5-2699v4 on eBay with a ton of spinners to have a local internet

Hahaha, let's fork internet. Replace bulky servers with lean 48 MB half core variants while we're at it.

somik · March 22

@AnthonySmith said:

@somik said:
Some people here running their public site on 64mb RAM while I'm running my private home server on 128GB DDR4 RAM...

Haha, well to be fair I have been spec'ing up a 1TB ram dual E5-2699v4 on eBay with a ton of spinners to have a local internet, software and repo cache and llm, because I think the internet as we know it is going in a very bad direction.

Mine is dual E5-2695v4 with 128GB DDR4 at 2400 Hz with a Chinese Machinist E-ATX motherboard. Got the cpu+ram+mobo combo at 500 SGD (about 400 USD?)

I didn't go for 2699s due to the absurd price and high TDP. I mean my main use case is idling and using it on and off for home use...

If it was still before the RAM price hike, I would go for 1TB for bragging rights, but can't afford it anymore... Don't really have a use case anyway.

somik · March 27

Did the following on @Neoon's microlxc alpine container. Managed to bring down the usual 20mb to about 5mb

apk update
apk upgrade
apk del curl wget 
apk del $(grep "^P:" /lib/apk/db/installed | sed 's/^P://' | grep -E "^(cloud-init|cloud-utils|py3-|python3|pyc)")
apk del nvme-cli syslinux mtools numactl curl e2fsprogs-extra partx qemu-guest-agent qemu-guest-agent-openrc
apk del readline gdbm mpdecimal sqlite-libs yaml p11-kit libtasn1 gnutls nettle gmp libidn2 libunistring libexpat libedit libffi shadow tzdata libseccomp libncursesw libpanelw ncurses-terminfo-base
rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*
reboot

Neoon · March 27

AnthonySmith · March 27

@somik said:
Did the following on @Neoon's microlxc alpine container. Managed to bring down the usual 20mb to about 5mb

apk update
apk upgrade
apk del curl wget 
apk del $(grep "^P:" /lib/apk/db/installed | sed 's/^P://' | grep -E "^(cloud-init|cloud-utils|py3-|python3|pyc)")
apk del nvme-cli syslinux mtools numactl curl e2fsprogs-extra partx qemu-guest-agent qemu-guest-agent-openrc
apk del readline gdbm mpdecimal sqlite-libs yaml p11-kit libtasn1 gnutls nettle gmp libidn2 libunistring libexpat libedit libffi shadow tzdata libseccomp libncursesw libpanelw ncurses-terminfo-base
rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*
reboot

I bloody love containers (not docker) I was officially the words biggest OpenVZ hater for a while, then I realised the power of the dark side.

Such a shame OpenVZ died.

somik · March 28

@AnthonySmith said:
@somik said:
Did the following on @Neoon's microlxc alpine container. Managed to bring down the usual 20mb to about 5mb
apk update
apk upgrade
apk del curl wget 
apk del $(grep "^P:" /lib/apk/db/installed | sed 's/^P://' | grep -E "^(cloud-init|cloud-utils|py3-|python3|pyc)")
apk del nvme-cli syslinux mtools numactl curl e2fsprogs-extra partx qemu-guest-agent qemu-guest-agent-openrc
apk del readline gdbm mpdecimal sqlite-libs yaml p11-kit libtasn1 gnutls nettle gmp libidn2 libunistring libexpat libedit libffi shadow tzdata libseccomp libncursesw libpanelw ncurses-terminfo-base
rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*
reboot
I bloody love containers (not docker) I was officially the words biggest OpenVZ hater for a while, thæn I realised the power of the dark side.

Such a shame OpenVZ died.

Since I always had issues with OpenVZ configs, i avoided it. However ever since I started using proxmox and it's LXC containers, I've been using it for most of my deployments, except for VMs that need to be isolated...

As for docker, I am ashamed to admit that it is still the best way to distribute your program/app and be sure that it runs for everyone. I convert most of my script/programs/apps to docker and deploy them across my servers.

how · April 1

Cool!

hornet · April 1

@terrorgen said: checkout microvm

Is there a specific project, or just the technology in general that you recommend?

terrorgen · April 4

@hornet said:

@terrorgen said: checkout microvm

Is there a specific project, or just the technology in general that you recommend?

So far the qemu microvm implementation is the most interesting to me.

jcn50 · April 25

@AnthonySmith sorry to revive this old thread~ I wanted to push it a step further by enabling Btrfs but I am getting this:

[root@sysrescue ~]# e2fsck /dev/vda
e2fsck 1.47.3 (8-Jul-2025)
/dev/vda: recovering journal
Setting free inodes count to 256411 (was 256551)
Setting free blocks count to 887637 (was 822448)
/dev/vda: clean, 5723/262144 files, 241937/1048576 blocks
[root@sysrescue ~]# btrfs-convert /dev/vda
btrfs-convert from btrfs-progs v6.12
ERROR: block size is too small: 1024 < 4096
WARNING: error during conversion, the original filesystem is not modified

Is there any chance to get the block size of subsequent containers @ 4096 block size? (I didn't want to open a ticket for that, I thought it would be more appropriate here)

AnthonySmith · April 25

@jcn50 said:
@AnthonySmith sorry to revive this old thread~ I wanted to push it a step further by enabling Btrfs but I am getting this:
[root@sysrescue ~]# e2fsck /dev/vda
e2fsck 1.47.3 (8-Jul-2025)
/dev/vda: recovering journal
Setting free inodes count to 256411 (was 256551)
Setting free blocks count to 887637 (was 822448)
/dev/vda: clean, 5723/262144 files, 241937/1048576 blocks
[root@sysrescue ~]# btrfs-convert /dev/vda
btrfs-convert from btrfs-progs v6.12
ERROR: block size is too small: 1024 < 4096
WARNING: error during conversion, the original filesystem is not modified
Is there any chance to get the block size of subsequent containers @ 4096 block size? (I didn't want to open a ticket for that, I thought it would be more appropriate here)

You will need to install alpine via netbooy.xyz if you want to do that, we use the official OS distro cloud images, alpine uses 1024 block size on the file system as standard on cloud images, not a lot I can do about it.

Maybe you can change it via rescue mode with a chroot and copy/write .. but it would be faster just to install from scratch tbh.

WSS · April 26

Butthole

VPS · April 26

Great lowend stuff, remembers me of all that 128mb vps scams

TemporiousOne · April 26

I'm actually pretty surprised what can be run on a 128mb instance of Alpine Linux. Managed to get Wireguard, Shadowsocks, AmneziaWG and Python FastAPI running concurrently. Some tweaking with Zram and swap needed though.

AnthonySmith · April 26

@TemporiousOne said:
I'm actually pretty surprised what can be run on a 128mb instance of Alpine Linux. Managed to get Wireguard, Shadowsocks, AmneziaWG and Python FastAPI running concurrently. Some tweaking with Zram and swap needed though.

Amazing low end spirit! Please write a post about your stack, what you are running and sample configs if you have time!

Neoon · May 12

See, I couldn't replicate that wizzard magic of yours.
The problem seems to be the booting phase.

if I go below 200MB on boot, the VM fails to load into ramdisk.
Despite trying to reduce Initramfs etc.

With a custom kernel, you probably could pull this off.

AnthonySmith · May 12

@Neoon said:
See, I couldn't replicate that wizzard magic of yours.
The problem seems to be the booting phase.

if I go below 200MB on boot, the VM fails to load into ramdisk.
Despite trying to reduce Initramfs etc.

With a custom kernel, you probably could pull this off.

I don't understand? I just use the stock alpine images that they publish they are only 180mb in total for the entire image.

Maybe proxmox bloat is punching you in the face?

Happy to send you the source qcow2 and the TierHive cloud init yaml files if you want.

I have not used proxmox meaningfully since around 2015 I just know it started making strange choices about a lot of things which resulted in more strange choices and bloat.

somik · May 12

@AnthonySmith said:

@Neoon said:
See, I couldn't replicate that wizzard magic of yours.
The problem seems to be the booting phase.

if I go below 200MB on boot, the VM fails to load into ramdisk.
Despite trying to reduce Initramfs etc.

With a custom kernel, you probably could pull this off.

I don't understand? I just use the stock alpine images that they publish they are only 180mb in total for the entire image.

Maybe proxmox bloat is punching you in the face?

Happy to send you the source qcow2 and the TierHive cloud init yaml files if you want.

I have not used proxmox meaningfully since around 2015 I just know it started making strange choices about a lot of things which resulted in more strange choices and bloat.

@AnthonySmith is probably using the alpine image for Virtual systems:
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.23/releases/x86_64/alpine-virt-3.23.4-x86_64.iso

Rest of the alpine images are all over 300 MB: https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/

somik · May 12

The virt iso seems to boot fine in 128 MB ram in proxmox VM:

AnthonySmith · May 12

@somik said: @AnthonySmith is probably using the alpine image for Virtual systems:
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.23/releases/x86_64/alpine-virt-3.23.4-x86_64.iso

Not using ISO's

go here: https://alpinelinux.org/cloud/

Then change cloud provider to generic, set the options:

https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.23/releases/cloud/generic_alpine-3.23.4-x86_64-bios-cloudinit-r0.qcow2

Which gives you the official stripped down build for KVM with cloud init injected virtual machine build with none of the extra crap you dont need which bloats everything and then you have a system that cant even boot on 200 mb

Neoon · May 12

See, I have been setup for failure from the start.
I didn't try with BIOS / Seabios, these images where UEFI, fk me.

Alpine Linux 3.23 - 23mb ram | 71mb disk - guide

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