Most of the RAM usage would likely just be executable files that are mmap’d from disk.. not “real” RAM usage. But, also, the 1000 users in question wouldn’t all be connected at the same time… and I honestly doubt they would all be assigned to the same server for practical reasons anyways.

It’s not easy to estimate the real RAM usage with back of the napkin math.

Depending on what they're doing, it could easily be multiple Gb per user. When you do VSCode remoting, pretty much everything but the UI is running on the server. This includes stuff like code analysis for autocompletion, which - especially for languages that require type inference to provide useful completions - can consume a lot of RAM, and a fair bit of CPU.

> I honestly doubt they would all be assigned to the same server for practical reasons anyways.

The computer science department at my university had multiple servers. All CS students got an account on the one same server by default. Access was granted to other servers on a case by case basis, based on very course-specific needs.

So yes, in my case, all CS undergrads used the same one server.