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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 orchestrator, 5 nginx pods (PSS, 1 GiB arm64 VM) 24.6 MiB k3s minimal: 603 MiB bench/RESULTS.md
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
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

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).