[NathanKP]

A Node.js REST API can handle a significant volume of incoming requests with only 50mb-75mb of RAM. For reference here is a load test of handling around 75k-80k reqs/min using node.js containers deployed using Amazon ECS. Each node.js process is basically just doing CRUD operations, accepting incoming JSON, storing it in a database, fetching values back out of a database, and sending JSON back to clients. There is a bit of extra overhead from microservice HTTP fanout to other backend microservices, but the whole stack is very lightweight and 99% of requests are served in under 30ms.

As you can see this workload is only using about 6% of the available memory. For event loop driven systems like Node.js or Nginx, or Go the workload is almost always CPU bound not memory bound:

http://i.imgur.com/VCN5e21.png