I have a small homelab running a few services, some written by myself for small tasks - so the load is basically just me a few times a day.

Now, I'm a Java developer during the day, so I'm relatively productive with it and used some of these apps as learning opportunities (balls to my own wall overengineering to try out a new framework or something).

Problem is, each app uses something like 200mb of memory while doing next to nothing. That seems excessive. Native images dropped that to ~70mb, but that needs a bunch of resources to build.

So my question is, what is you go-to for such cases?

My current candidates are Python/FastAPI, Rust and Elixir, but I'm open for anything at this point - even if it's just for learning new languages.