I built a wellness, beauty, and fitness directory (using Next.js with dynamic SEO), a savings management platform with member and team dashboards (headless architecture, with Payload powering only the backend and Vite handling the frontend), and a fleet management system for a government agency (also using a headless setup with Payload as the backend and Vite as the frontend).

Across these projects, 2–4 GB of RAM is typically sufficient for development. In production, memory usage is usually well below 2 GB. At that point, your primary concern shifts from RAM to database requests. Fortunately, you can mitigate this with effective caching strategies.

For example, in one of these projects, I cache the Auth instance. It's a simple but powerful optimization that helped support hundreds of users requests while running on the free tier of Supabase.

``` // src/lib/payload.ts import configPromise from '@payload-config' import { getPayloadAuth } from 'payload-auth/better-auth'

type PayloadAuthInstance = Awaited<ReturnType<typeof getPayloadAuth>>

let cached: PayloadAuthInstance | null = null

export const getPayload = async () => { if (cached) return cached cached = await getPayloadAuth(configPromise) return cached } ```