Raspberry Pi 3 A+ - v1.19.2+k3s1 Just Not Enough Memory

After finally getting k3s up and running I find that the little guy just doesn’t have enough memory to run the server. If you have swap enabled you’ll see 100% usage and very poor performance. Without swap you see very bad performance. In fact it’s unusable. The minimal Pi based system for k3s should probably be a Pi 3 B+ with 1GB.

I’m running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (buster). A clean install leaves you with about 300MB free. How much memory does k3s need and is there any way to limit the memory being used (fewer server processes?, better GC?)?

Does anyone have k3s running on a Pi3 A+? It seems to start out (okay) for a few minutes before it eats the available ~80MB of free memory and essentially useless.

I abandoned 512MB long ago, not even an old docker is usable on that amount of RAM. There are so many (cheap) alternatives now. NEVER enable swap on RPi, not even the latest one. It absolutely kills the system as soon as it starts to swap because of the bad I/O (especially to the SD card).