Sorry for the late reply.
I am getting a 8GB model and hope that helps. I will update when I have the new board.
To answer above questions, I have around 775MB of fonts for ass subtitles. I know it sounds a lot for most people. But most of them are fonts for Chinese characters for anime. Each one would be easily between 5MB~10MB, some are over 30MB. Also each anime video uses different fonts. So it adds up rather quickly.
The interesting thing is LibreElec 10.0b2 (Kodi v19.0) doesn't have this problem. It only loads the fonts used by that particular video. Starting with LibreElec 10.0b3 (Kodi v19.1), it loads ALL fonts under .kodi/media/Fonts when a video starts. This not only causes unnecessary huge memory consumption but also increases the load time of that video (from loading all fonts.) The original design makes more sense, IMO.
I agree 1GB is rather small for today's hardware. But without ASS subtitles, LibreElec runs just almost perfectly with 1GB RPi 4. Having more memory just for loading fonts for ASS doesn't seem to be reasonable. Also with a large collection of video mentioned above, the font directory would grow very quickly. That would also increase the loading time dramatically for a video, too.
I might need more information on why a ram disk would help here. I thought a ram disk would eat up some memory and leaves even less for loading fonts, and crash even faster.
