📱 Local dev server uses almost 6GB of RAM on a tiny Next.js project, is that normal?

I started a small Next.js project two weeks ago, just a landing page and a contact form. Nothing fancy, no database, maybe eight components in total and a few images from my phone gallery. Yesterday I opened Task Manager while the dev server was running and saw it sitting at almost 6GB. My laptop has 8GB total, so the browser tabs and everything else were fighting for whatever was left. The fan starts spinning the moment I save a file, and it stays loud for about a minute. Hot reload takes four or five seconds now, when it used to be instant in the first week. I am working from my bedroom in Tolichowki and the room gets warm by afternoon anyway. By evening the keyboard itself feels hot, which is not something I enjoy when I am typing for hours. I have already tried deleting the node_modules folder and installing everything again, and it helped for one day. Then the memory crept back up as I kept adding things, so I think something is slowly leaking. I also closed every extension in my editor except the basic ones, and that saved maybe 300MB, nothing more. Restarting the server brings it back down to around 2GB, but it climbs again within an hour. One thing I noticed is that the images are quite large, some are 4MB straight from the phone camera. I am not sure if the dev server keeps all of them in memory, but it could be part of this. I have not touched any config files because I am scared of breaking something that mostly works. My friend uses a similar setup on 16GB and says he never checks memory, so he could not help me. So I am wondering what a normal number looks like for a small project like this one. Should I be compressing the images first, or is that a separate problem from the memory climbing? If anyone has fixed this on a low RAM laptop, I would like to hear what changed for you. I do not want to spend money on an upgrade if a simple setting can solve it.

6 GB on an 8 GB laptop is painful. Besides the photo size that shafiullah52 fixed, I found the dev server uses more memory when the project sits inside a synced folder like OneDrive. Moving mine out of OneDrive dropped the memory and the startup time a lot. Did you try restarting the dev server after a few hours of work? It slowly grows on mine.

My old laptop had 8GB too, and a Next.js project crawled the same way after two weeks. Those 4MB phone photos were my problem as well, and shrinking them to under 300KB made reload faster. I did not touch any config, I just resized the pictures and restarted the server fresh. The memory still climbs for me, just slower, so maybe some of it is simply how the dev mode behaves.