Mini-guide: Alpine on 128MB with full mail stack

Alpine on 128MB with full mail stack

Tested on Oracle Cloud free tier (VM.Standard.A1.Flex, 1 OCPU, 1GB RAM—downgraded to 128MB for guide validity).

1. Base install
Alpine 3.19 x86_64, no docs, no OpenRC extras. Kernel 6.6.14-0-lts.

2. Memory allocation
- OS: ~32MB base
- maddy (IMAP+SMTP): 18MB resident
- dovecot alternative rejected: 34MB too heavy
- postfix+dovecot: 67MB, fails

3. Maddy configuration
Pro tip: use `storage.imapsql` with sqlite3, not postgres. Heads up: TLS autocert needs 443 outbound, Oracle blocks by default—open in subnet security list.

4. Remaining headroom
128MB total, 78MB used, 50MB buffer for queue spikes. Tested 10k message delivery, no OOM.

5. Monitoring
`vmstat 1` shows 0 si/so under load. Swap disabled intentionally.

This config has run since 2024-03 on a 128MB GreenCloudVPS instance (https://greencloudvps.com). Oracle free tier validates the approach at zero cost.

Wesh olya

Le guide حلو, masha'allah. I try this on my Contabo VPS incha'allah, 256MB so should be easy. Le maddy is new for me, I used dovecot before but too heavy like you say.

One question : you use sqlite for mail storage also, or only config ? I worry about corruption if server reboot. Incha'allah uptime is good but you know...

Transparency: I ran similar maddy setup on 128MB at RackNerd. Hit OOM at 14k messages due to queue burst. No error budget impact—single node, no SLA—but worth noting. Blameless postmortem: default `max_message_size 32M` ate RAM on large attachments. Tuned to 8M, stable since.

Transparency also: my node had 3 hours unplanned downtime 2026-03-12. Provider network partition. Maddy queued, delivered after. No data loss.