I've ran the initial FreeBSD patchsets for ZFS support on a dual-p3 with 1.5g ram, so 1g for a recent version should be more than doable. ZFS on FreeBSD has bec

I've ran the initial FreeBSD patchsets for ZFS support on a dual-p3 with 1.5g ram, so 1g for a recent version should be more than doable. ZFS on FreeBSD has become a lot better with low-memory situations. There are two additional things to consider. ZFS uses RAM mostly for aggressive caching to cover over both spinning disks and the iops tradeoff vdevs make over traditional raid arrays. Thus low memory is not such a big deal if you have a pool with a single SSD or NVMe device. The other point to consider is that on at least any non-Solaris derived platforms, the VFS layer does not speak ARC. So data is copied from an ARC object into a VFS object, taking up space in both. If you are able to adopt your platform to use the ARC as direct VFS cache, you can save RAM that way as well.