Yup, I had a (tiny, spinning rust) home server that was slowed to nearly a halt. SSH logins would take minutes even when limiting IPFS to 2GiB of the 16GiB of RAM. Stopped go-ipfs and it was instantly snappy again.
My impression of the IPFS project is that the goals are excellent, the core protocol is quite good however they like rewriting the higher level layers far too frequently (for example they have deprecated UnixFS which seems to be the most used format and they keep switching between JSON, Protocol Buffers and CBOR) and go-ipfs seems to be a pretty garbage codebase.
Any chance that, by limiting RAM usage, you forced your application to heavily swap, clogging the disk and making your machine slow?
I have run a public gateway on 2GB of RAM. Later 4GB because it was subject to very heavy abuse, but it was perfectly possible. Perhaps it is a matter of knowing how to configure things and how to not inflict self-pain with wrong settings.
Yes, there is definitely a chance but it was wayyyy worse when I gave it more or unlimited ram. At least this way the machine was operational most of the time. I don't think it was swapping but since I think the limit I applied also affected the page cache it was likely reading it's data from disk a lot more often than it would of if it could own the whole page cache. But this is basically the same effect as swapping.
Maybe there is a Goldilocks value I could find, but I didn't really need IPFS running that much so I just removed it.
My impression of the IPFS project is that the goals are excellent, the core protocol is quite good however they like rewriting the higher level layers far too frequently (for example they have deprecated UnixFS which seems to be the most used format and they keep switching between JSON, Protocol Buffers and CBOR) and go-ipfs seems to be a pretty garbage codebase.