I know this issue has been raised before, but how is the mem-usage supposed to be for NodeBB?
I have a 500MB Digital Ocean droplet, only NodeBB and MongoDB running, and I got 61MB free with no-one but me and my 59 posts in the forum atm, and the MongoD has been running for about three weeks.
Initially I thought MongoDB was the hog, but I am now bit amazed that it's NodeBB. Not sure what I was expecting, but still a but puzzled about that...
$> free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 488 302 59 0 127 154
Swap: 0 0 0
$> top
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %MEM %CPU TIME+ COMMAND
2282 gnimmelf 20 0 1350308 180760 16624 S 36.1 0.0 0:16.46 nodejs
2024 gnimmelf 20 0 955644 40172 10268 S 8.0 0.0 0:01.00 nodejs
1269 mongodb 20 0 268956 34404 364 S 6.9 1.3 0:17.84 mongod
-Both nodejs
's are NodeBB...
If I start with ./nodebb dev
, I'm left with 9MB free, which kills it when I install plugins in dev mode...
Maybe we could spec out some aprox. minimum requirements for NodeBB, pref in conjunction with DB setups (MongoDB, I hate reading your documentation!)?
If I open up this forum for the intended people, around 200, it will probably die quite often, I can assume, even though I doubt there will bee too much traffic.
Per now my only option is to resize the droplet to $10 or $20, which is doable, but not preferable to technical trimming of any kind 
Please advice, and I'll be happy to help.
/Cheers