Baking

This artcile explains how to reduce the memory usage of Tezos node, without changing the code at all.

Note: this is not to claim that 8GB is the minimum requirement to run current Tezos node.

Use --singleprocess option

By default, Tezos node runs 2 processes, the main process and the validator process, to execute the block validation and the other jobs in parallel. Unfortunately this increases the memory usage.