Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.
I am using laravel forge and DigitalOcean to run or host my laravel project. I want to run a test installation by buying a new domain and let forge and digital ocean handle it. Is 512MB of memory enough to run a test installation? I will upgrade the Memory once the test install is successful.
I think that you need 1GB of memory, but for small app 512MB would be enough
You can watch this lesson
https://laracasts.com/series/server-management-with-forge/episodes/3
https://deploybot.com/guides/deploy-a-laravel-app-to-digitalocean
https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/servers/ram-usage-and-laravel?page=1
If Laracasts is hosted on 4GB, then I think that some ordinary Laravel app needs much less than that. Guess that you can run it on less than 512MB.
You can just about squeeze into 512mb depending on the DB you're using - but you might get some odd errors. You can also enable swap - but Digital Ocean pretty strongly recommend not doing that. If it's purely a test install you could try using sqlite instead of mysql/postgres too.
The main memory hogger is your database and PHP if you do a lot of memory intensive stuff. Tell us what you're doing on your app and we'll advise :) you could probably run a Laravel with with no DB on 256MB (of free RAM not including OS).
My website huedaya.com use Laravel 9 on top of Docker container with 70MB memory limit, remote MariaDB database, and 5 Task scheduler (triggered with cronjob). And its working fine.
@huedaya that was not the question (6 years ago)
Please or to participate in this conversation.