Thanks for sharing your experience, indeed the distribution is relevant here. I am running Arch (BTW) on this VPS which idles at about 300 MB with dockerd and containerd, I am not sure how does exactly compare to Debian on RAM usage (I have a couple of other VPS running debian which seem to use a little bit more RAM but it could be because those images are bastardized by the addition of cloud provider services). In any case my setup is pretty minimal, to get some large benefit there I fear I should use something without systemd :/