How do the computational requirements of Code Server evolve?

[aghasemi]

Hi. I have been using code server for about 3 years now (and it has been amazing. Thanks a lot!). I have always tried to stay on the latest version, updating as soon as a new version comes, and also updating my extensions in the docker file that I use.

However, the VPS instance on which I run code server has not changed its specs :) It has the same amount of RAM and cpu cores as it originally had. This makes me wonder, how far can I continue to update, while still expecting a smooth experience from the web application?

May I ask please, if there is any internal research/analysis/etc on how the resource usage has evolved in the past couple of years for code servers? For example, do we know how much more RAM the current version consumes compared the latest version last year this time? Of course it depends on a ton of factors, but even a trend slope can be very useful.

Thanks a lot.

[benz0li]

At the minimum, we [Coder] recommend:

• 1 GB of RAM
• 2 CPU cores

– https://coder.com/docs/code-server/requirements

That is sufficient to run code-server. As soon as extensions are involved, RAM usage may increase quite a lot.

[benz0li]

I have been running my JupyterLab docker stacks with limited resources (2 CPU cores, 8 GB of RAM) for some years now.

[aghasemi]

At the minimum, we [Coder] recommend:

• 1 GB of RAM
• 2 CPU cores

– https://coder.com/docs/code-server/requirements

That is sufficient to run code-server. As soon as extensions are involved, RAM usage may increase quite a lot.

Thanks. Yes I know about the official requirements. My questions is how/how fast do they evolve over time? And also how "far" they are from actual usage of the barebone code server web application?

[code-asher]

We base our docs off the minimum requirements here (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/requirements), which I think have not changed since code-server started.

It might be a good question to ask upstream (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode) since we just wrap VS Code here and are not involved in the core development. I have no idea if they have any resource usage guarantees or goals, or if they do any performance testing.

I think doing that testing ourselves would be out of scope for code-server, personally.