This would be great as Coder server averages around only 200MB of ram usage, but requires me to allocate 512MB on startup, which raises VM costs. Even something like coder server extract-cache would be useful for running during Docker builds instead of runtime.
Edit: unrelated but does the extracting of the .tar.zst leak? Memory usage hovered around 200MB after extracting, but if it was not extracted, it hovers around 90MB.

@kotx If you want a quick fix for changing the folder, you can set this in your Dockerfile today:

ENV CODER_CACHE_DIRECTORY=/data/cache

This would be great as Coder server averages around only 200MB of ram usage, but requires me to allocate 512MB on startup, which raises VM costs. Even something like coder server extract-cache would be useful for running during Docker builds instead of runtime.

It's not a bad idea, although it sounds like your scenario would benefit more from not using the full binary (that bundles binaries for all platforms). In the build process, we create binaries called "slim", you could use a slim binary for running coder server and manually place the slim binaries in /data/cache/site/bin/ (or whichever path you define).

Unfortunately, we currently don't have a slim bundle available for download as part of a release.

(PS. Feel free to open a ticket about this feature, or request slim binaries in releases, or both.)

Edit: unrelated but does the extracting of the .tar.zst leak? Memory usage hovered around 200MB after extracting, but if it was not extracted, it hovers around 90MB.

I do get ~90MB even with extraction. The relevant code lives here https://github.com/coder/coder/blob/57f3410009201df2038f06a65c796e9690c2e617/site/site.go/#L583-L630 and I can't see anything that would cause a leak (assuming it's not in the library). Which platform are you running coder server on? (I tested in a docker container based on Alpine, running on amd64.)

Edit: How are you measuring the memory usage, btw? I wonder if what you may be seeing is the systems filesystem cache being used?

Edit: How are you measuring the memory usage, btw? I wonder if what you may be seeing is the systems filesystem cache being used?

Filesystem cache is definitely possible, I was just checking the memory usage metric on Fly.io which measure the whole VM. So there probably isn't a leak.

If you want a quick fix for changing the folder, you can set this in your Dockerfile today:

Yup, this is my workaround for now:
https://github.com/kotx/coder-fly/blob/master/make-cache.sh

#!/bin/sh
echo "Generating coder server cache..."

set -euxo pipefail

if [ -z $CODER_CACHE_DIRECTORY ]; then
	echo "CODER_CACHE_DIRECTORY unset, exiting..."
	exit
fi

timeout 120 /opt/coder server >/dev/null 2>&1 &
until [ -d $CODER_CACHE_DIRECTORY/site ] || [ ! -d /proc/$! ]
do
	echo "Waiting for $CODER_CACHE_DIRECTORY/site..."
	sleep 5
done

echo "Detected coder server cache!"
sleep 2

It's not ideal, but it seems to have worked so far.

I occasionally lose my https://coder-access-url/bin/ folder when I update my Coder deployment (dpkg -i coder.deb && systemctl restart coder). @mafredri and I chatted and suspect this is the issue. I'll report back if changing the cache dir helped