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I want to install a standalone SharePoint server in a virtual machine for development purposes. I installed SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2012 and was surprised to see that the memory usage is sky high (6GB) for a site with one document library and only 3 small files. The internet seems to say that this is fairly normal.
I am not opposed to installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2008R2, but before I start entirely over, does SharePoint 2010 have lower memory requirements?
I have a 2 server dev environment for SharePoint 2010 with 2 GB RAM, a dual core processor and a cheap SSD. It runs fine for development and some light testing/demo. For the official test environment it's an 8 GB quad core system (single server). I've never had any complaints with these systems with these specs.
For my SharePoint 2013 environment I found it was hard to work on a single server farm with 8 GB RAM. This was basically my 3 year old work laptop. I am currently waiting until I can get a 16 GB system with an SSD.
The official minimum requirements for RAM are as follows:
SP 2010: 8 GB
SP 2013: 24 GB
But as I said, for a development environment (SQL Server on another box) 2 GB has been fine for me for more than a year.
EDIT - 9/9/2013
I am experimenting to see if I can comfortably perform development on a single server installation of SharePoint (AD is on a separate system). This system has the following configuration:
Here is what my memory usage looks like with just the above and absolutely no applications running. Just over 1/2 the memory in my system is used. Once I get VS running and Outlook, it's about 10 GB used. So if you are looking to do development on 2013 and want to do it locally with less than 24 GB, I would ask myself, would you want to do development on a system with effectively 6 GB RAM? A 24 GB total is probably what most people would be conformable with in the long run.
SP2013 needs a lot more memory than SP2010.
SP2010 needs a lot less memory than 2013. On my main dev VM (i.e. with Visual Studio), I've got the VM set to 8GB, and that's plenty - I have another where I have it max out at 4GB, I think it's dynamic from 2-4; I don't think I've run into problems on that one either, but I don't use it as much.
SP2013 on Server 2008R2, at 8GB, I was getting out of memory exceptions when I was trying to do something with search. I've got my SP2013 VM set to go from 8-14GB I think (might be 12 or 16 cap?), and it does get up there after it's been on for a bit.
