Paperless-ngx VPS requirements: RAM, CPU and disk for a paperless office

Sizing guide

Our recommendations, derived from the sourced figures below. Not measurements.

Official requirements

What people report in practice

Individual reports, not controlled tests. Versions, hardware and settings differ, so treat these as data points, not guarantees.

• Webserver container idled at about 290 MB, then rose to 2.7 GB with spikes to 4.12 and 4.63 GB after opening the web UI. A second user saw 300–600 MB idle grow to 8 GB and an OOM kill with the frontend in use; others capped it with a Docker memory limit and swap

  GitHub discussion opened in 2025, replies into Jan 2026; a maintainer could not reproduce it and pointed to background tasks such as suggestions

  GitHub GitHub paperless-ngx discussion #9031: High RAM on Frontend Access · checked Oct 25, 2026

• On a 2 GiB / 2-core VM with 100 documents, the webserver started at 365 MiB; one call to the document-suggestions endpoint took it to 1.125 GiB and a second made the VM unresponsive. The classifier file was 509 MiB, about 172 MiB each for tags, document types and correspondents with auto-matching on; removing auto-matching dropped edits to about 150 MiB extra

  GitHub discussion, Feb 2023 (v1.x); a maintainer suggested PAPERLESS_NUMBER_OF_SUGGESTED_DATES=0. Another user's model was 70 MB at 869 documents

  GitHub GitHub paperless-ngx discussion #2735: High memory usage on /api/documents/:id/suggestions · checked Oct 25, 2026

• "With 1 GB RAM provided the processing of document tasks crashed regularly on bigger documents. With increase to 2 GB everything is stable." Another user said their Synology instance needs about 4 GB

  GitHub discussion about Raspberry Pi RAM, Feb 2024; Intel NUC VM

  GitHub GitHub paperless-ngx discussion #5833: Raspberry Pi RAM requirement · checked Oct 25, 2026

• A user asking about a 1 vCPU / 1 GB cloud VM was told Redis "will run just fine on 1GB" for Paperless (Redis's own 4 GB guidance is for enterprise use); a maintainer added that Redis is required

  GitHub discussion, May 2024

  GitHub GitHub paperless-ngx discussion #6835: Run paperless-ngx on lightweight hardware · checked Oct 25, 2026

• Container usually about 1.5 GB, occasionally spiking to about 3 GB, with PAPERLESS_TASK_WORKERS=2 and PAPERLESS_THREADS_PER_WORKER=4 (up to 8 cores during ingestion). Another user with about 500 documents saw brief CPU spikes on page loads and searches but little RAM change

  r/selfhosted thread, Aug 2024

  Reddit Reddit r/selfhosted: Paperless-NGX - what are y'all using for specs? · checked Oct 25, 2026

• One user with about 900 documents saw 145 MiB in docker stats right after ingesting new ones. Others saw a few hundred MB grow to several GB during uploads until the stack restarted, OCR of large documents filling over 18 GB on a Synology, and OOM crashes on an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 5 during big imports

  r/Paperlessngx thread, Dec 2025; individual reports, versions mostly not given

  Reddit Reddit r/Paperlessngx: Paperless memory usage · checked Oct 25, 2026

• OCR workers killed with SIGKILL on 30-page, 25 MB, 600 dpi scans. A maintainer: "The worker is being killed by the system, likely due to memory constraints… Ocr is an intensive process." The reporter still saw it after raising RAM from 4 to 8 GB

  GitHub issue, Oct 2024 (v2.x); closed as not a Paperless bug

  GitHub GitHub paperless-ngx #8125: Workers ending prematurely with kill -9 · checked Oct 25, 2026

• Rebuilding the Tantivy search index for about 50,000 documents peaked at 4.2 GB of RAM before an optimization and 1.6 GB after, and ran over 5× faster

  Contributor's benchmark in a pull request merged into the v3 beta branch, Jul 2026

  GitHub GitHub paperless-ngx PR #13053: Tantivy indexing optimization · checked Oct 25, 2026

• Their table: about 880 MB idle and 1.9 GB at OCR peak for the full stack (webserver ~650 MB idle / 1.1 GB peak, Tika ~160 / 400 MB, Gotenberg ~10 / 300 MB, PostgreSQL ~50 / 100 MB, Redis ~10 MB), and 5–10 MB of disk per document. They recommend 2 GB minimum, 4 GB recommended

  A VPS host's tutorial with PostgreSQL, Tika and Gotenberg; their figures, not ours

  Blog Virtua.Cloud: Self-host Paperless-ngx on a VPS with Docker Compose · checked Oct 25, 2026

What drives Paperless-ngx's RAM use

OCR is the big one

Paperless hands scanned pages to OCRmyPDF and Tesseract. Each thread works on one page, and threads default to every core, so a 4-vCPU box OCRs four pages at once and needs RAM for all of them. High-dpi scans and long documents are the worst case. Born-digital PDFs with a text layer skip OCR in the default auto mode (OCR mode docs).

The matching model

Tags, document types and correspondents set to "Auto" train a classifier that gets loaded to make suggestions. In one 2023 report it was 509 MiB at 100 documents and pushed a 2 GiB VM over the edge (discussion #2735); another user's was 70 MB at 869 documents. If suggestions use too much memory, match on words or regex instead of Auto.

Webserver workers and memory that isn't returned

Each webserver worker loads the whole app, so keep the default of 1 on a small VPS. Several users report the webserver growing after browsing or uploading and not shrinking until a restart (#9031, #3616), while maintainers' own instances idle at roughly 400–550 MB. A Docker memory limit plus swap is what users settled on.

Disk: originals, archive copies and thumbnails

Paperless keeps your original, and for scanned documents also a PDF/A archive copy, plus a thumbnail. One host estimates 5–10 MB per document; your scans may be smaller or larger. PAPERLESS_ARCHIVE_FILE_GENERATION=never skips the archive copies. Search-index rebuilds on very large archives can also take more than a gigabyte of RAM.

Gotchas on a VPS

• Keep workers × threads at or below your vCPUs. The docs warn that going over your core count makes Paperless "extremely slow". On a 2-vCPU VPS, the defaults (1 worker, 2 threads) already use both cores during OCR, so the web UI may lag while documents process (docs).
• Add swap before your first big import. Memory spikes during OCR or index rebuilds are short. On a 2 GB plan, a couple of GB of swap turns an OOM kill into a slow moment; one Raspberry Pi user's out-of-memory crashes stopped after enlarging swap to 2 GB (#768).
• Large scans may need a longer timeout. Tasks are cut off after 1800 seconds by default. On a 1-vCPU plan, long scanned documents can hit that; raise PAPERLESS_WORKER_TIMEOUT or OCR fewer pages with PAPERLESS_OCR_PAGES.
• SQLite and parallel imports. SQLite is the low-resource default, but many workers importing at once can hit "database is locked" errors. The docs suggest PostgreSQL if you often process many documents at once, or a longer PAPERLESS_DB_TIMEOUT (troubleshooting).
• Back up with the exporter, and off the VPS. The built-in document_exporter writes documents and metadata to the export folder in a form you can re-import (administration docs). Copy that folder to another machine or object storage. A document archive is exactly the data you don't want to lose with a server.
• Don't expose the broker; put HTTPS in front. The docs ask you to make sure your Redis or Valkey instance is secured; in the stock compose files it is only on the internal Docker network, so don't publish port 6379. Serve the UI through a reverse proxy with HTTPS and set PAPERLESS_URL to your domain.

Cheapest plans that fit

Paperless-ngx, SQLite + Valkey, low-power settings: 2 GB RAM and 1+ vCPU

Threshold: VPSfit floor: one user's tasks crashed at 1 GB and were stable at 2 GB; most reports idle at 145–600 MB (source). Only plans with at least 1 vCPU are listed.

Paperless-ngx with PostgreSQL, Tika and Gotenberg: 4 GB RAM and 2+ vCPU

Threshold: VPSfit budget from a host's measurement of ~0.9 GB idle and ~1.9 GB OCR peak for this stack, plus OS and spike headroom (source). Only plans with at least 2 vCPUs are listed.

Paperless-ngx for big imports (2 workers × 2 threads): 4 GB RAM and 4+ vCPU

Threshold: Workers × threads must not exceed cores; one 2 × 4 setup idled at 1.5 GB and spiked to 3 GB (source). Only plans with at least 4 vCPUs are listed.

Plan links marked affiliate link are affiliate links: if you sign up through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. They go to the provider's site, not to the specific plan; the Source column links the plain pricing page we checked. Affiliate status never changes the order. Disclosure.

Prices checked Oct 21, 2026 on each provider's official pricing page. EUR prices converted at the ECB rate of Oct 20, 2026 (1 € = $1.1215) only for ranking. See all plans on the cheapest 4 GB VPS page.

Related pages

• Nextcloud requirements: Many people pair a document archive with file sync; Nextcloud's needs usually decide the server size.
• Immich requirements: Photos and paperwork on one server? Size for Immich's machine learning and Paperless's OCR peaks together.
• Coolify requirements: Paperless is a one-click service in Coolify (with Redis and SQLite); Coolify adds its own overhead.
• Vaultwarden requirements: A password vault costs almost nothing next to Paperless and fits on the same box.