That is a crucial question for performance! For a **medium-sized database**, the most important thing is to allocate enough RAM to hold the entire **working set** (indexes and most frequently queried data) in memory, so I'd recommend starting with at least **32GB** and monitoring its usage closely. And yes, absolutely build in **headroom**—over-provisioning RAM now is almost always cheaper than dealing with sluggish performance or costly future upgrades. When comparing operating systems, **Linux is generally the better choice** for database servers; its smaller kernel footprint and superior memory management doodle baseball mean significantly more of your purchased RAM is dedicated directly to the database's cache rather than running the OS itself, giving you better efficiency and performance.