Numbers
Measured against k3s, kind and k3d with the scripts in this repository; the linked files have the setup, raw data and caveats.
| litek8s | reference | source | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole control plane, idle, no pods (PSS, v0.2.1, 1 GiB x86_64 VM) | 23.2 MiB | k3s minimal: 567 MiB | bench/RESULTS.md |
| Whole orchestrator, 5 nginx pods (same) | 33.5 MiB | k3s minimal: 579 MiB | same |
| Argo CD + one synced app, orchestrator memory | 90 MiB | k3s minimal: 900 MiB | bench/RESULTS.md |
dev up → node Ready, Linux / macOS |
0.17 s / 1.28 s | kind 31.6 s / 34.3 s, k3d 11.1 s / 10.4 s | bench/RESULTS.md |
| Dev cluster idle memory, Linux | 47 MiB | kind 526 MiB, k3d 398 MiB | same |
| GitHub Actions job, Helm chart e2e (setup, install, test, upgrade) | 21 s, cluster ready in 2.6 s | kind (helm/kind-action): 79 s, 44.7 s | docs/ci.md |
| Metrics, logs and alerts, added memory | +1.8 MiB | kube-prometheus-stack + Loki: 1,371 MiB | bench/RESULTS.md |
| Compatibility corpus (kubectl, CRDs, workloads, networking, 47 Helm charts) | 119/119 | k3s: 119/119 | compat/RESULTS.md |
| Kubernetes v1.33 conformance (419 specs) | 413/419 | k3s: 416/419 | compat/CONFORMANCE.md |
On macOS a dev cluster runs in a Linux VM, and Activity Monitor shows the whole VM: 238 MiB fresh, ~380 MiB after pulling and running 5 nginx pods (the cluster itself is 30 and 79 MiB of that). macOS keeps charging the VM for every page its guest has touched until the VM stops (docs/dev.md).
The 6 conformance failures: 5 are macOS-only (TCP DNS on port 53, a hostPort binding) and pass on Linux; 1 was a watch fixed since. A 3-server HA control plane stays linearizable under leader kills and partitions (bench/HA.md); a 3-node cluster ran 21 h under churn with no leak (bench/SOAK.md).