Hi @djimmy,
The error message suggests there is not enough memory available to execute the WebAssembly.instantiate() function (which seems to come from the ssh2 module used by n8n).
This is odd seeing n8n usually runs with very little memory and I have successfully started it on potato machines in the past. In fact, to verify this is not a general problem with n8n or its dependencies I have just set up a very small free VM on Oracle Cloud with just 1 GB of RAM. I then first installed Node.js 14 and afterwards installed n8n and launched it like so (which is what I believe you mean were doing based on your description):
npm install n8n -g
n8n
This took a bit longer than it does on a more powerful machine but I was eventually greeted with the expected output:
So It very much seems this comes down to the specific environment you are running n8n in. Are you sure there is sufficient memory left when installing and starting n8n? What does the htop output look like during the process?