I have seen a number of very similar posts asking about system requirements that appear very botty and have been blocked but I thought I’d make some notes for those asking.
eg
I want to self-host Rocket.Chat, and when I checked the system requirements, I noticed the minimum system requirement for ≤50 concurrent users is 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, and 40 GB storage.
For testing, I installed it on Windows Docker and found that the entire Rocket.Chat container, including MongoDB, only used 4 GB of storage and about 800 MB of RAM in idle mode. This surprised me. So, I’m just trying to understand the official system requirements and how they are calculated.
Lastly, we have a small team of 5 people. How many resources might we need for that? Thanks!
So the answer is first - don’t use Windows. Really. It has big overhead, much higher resource requirements and is difficult to maintain. The preferred deployment methods are *buntu with docker, or snaps.
That is because, from experience, you get the least hassle.
See the docs for installs on other OS.
Rocket does not use many resources to start with but it will grow with usage.
Your biggest issue will be not reading the docs and therefore continuing to use GridFS and not some other form of file storage.
This will cause your DB to grow inexorably and slow you down eventually. It is just a matter of time.
You will then be scrambling to find the two scripts that will allow you to migrate to local file storage or bucket.
Beyond that most of the requirements are around running node/docker. 2Gb RAM is probably not sufficient in 2025. For a small install and a few users then 1 CPU + 4Gb RAM is a good start.
A lot of that will depend on the number of concurrent users. The more there are the more resources you will need.
50 occasionally logged users will probably take less overhead than 10 always on users.
I have one server with 100 occasional users, email server, clamav (which needs quite a bit of RAM), localised mongo, and rocket in docker and it has 2 CPU/6Gb and it is fine - I limit the rocket docker with
mem_limit: 4096MB
YMMV - there are no hard and fast rules and no one deployment type - you just have to monitor your setup and add resources as required.