# Can the Mender server run with less than 2 GB of ram?

**URL:** <https://hub.mender.io/t/can-the-mender-server-run-with-less-than-2-gb-of-ram/533>\
**Category:** General Discussions\
**Created:** [May 7, 2019, 4:14pm UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/can-the-mender-server-run-with-less-than-2-gb-of-ram/533 "2019-05-07T16:14:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9c0ed/32.png) [@mat](https://hub.mender.io/u/mat)\
**Post date:** [May 7, 2019, 4:14pm UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/can-the-mender-server-run-with-less-than-2-gb-of-ram/533/1 "2019-05-07T16:14:39Z")

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Hi guys,

I finally finished installing a mender server on an EC2 instance. One thing I struggled with is that it had a hard time running on a free tier t2.micro 1GB of ram instance. ./run ps would take a little while to show what’s going on (20-30seconds), and sometimes wouldn’t work at all and would show this kind of message :

```
~/mender-server/production$ ./run ps
^[[1;5FTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "bin/docker-compose", line 6, in <module>
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 71, in main
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 127, in perform_command
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 740, in ps
  File "compose/cli/formatter.py", line 24, in table
  File "compose/cli/formatter.py", line 14, in get_tty_width
  File "os.py", line 980, in popen
  File "subprocess.py", line 729, in __init__
  File "subprocess.py", line 1295, in _execute_child
OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory
[18407] Failed to execute script docker-compose

```

Bumping it up to a t2.small instance with 2GB of ram easily fixed this problem and now it’s working well. Just putting it here since either

1. I was doing something wrong and it should work fine with 1GB of ram  
or
2. 2GB is somewhat of a minimum requirement, in which case it could be good to add to the documentation.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kacf](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/hub.mender.io/kacf/32/146_2.png) [@kacf](https://hub.mender.io/u/kacf)\
**Post date:** [May 8, 2019, 7:14am UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/can-the-mender-server-run-with-less-than-2-gb-of-ram/533/2 "2019-05-08T07:14:56Z")

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Check out this entry:  
[https://docs.mender.io/2.0/troubleshooting/mender-server#mender-conductor-service-fails-to-start-in-production](https://docs.mender.io/2.0/troubleshooting/mender-server#mender-conductor-service-fails-to-start-in-production)  
and see if it helps.

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**Author:** ![mterwoord](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/hub.mender.io/mterwoord/32/100_2.png) [@mterwoord](https://hub.mender.io/u/mterwoord)\
**Post date:** [May 8, 2019, 7:41am UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/can-the-mender-server-run-with-less-than-2-gb-of-ram/533/3 "2019-05-08T07:41:02Z")

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My Mender server runs on a VM with 2 GB of ram, while also running a couple of other services, and the machine still having room to spare (it currently runs an MSSQL docker container, a postgres container, our cloud service).

To be honest, we don’t have too much devices linked yet…