It entirely depends how your source is written, how big your client object actually is for example, how you load and store your maps, how complex your maps tile system is, how many mobs you have spawned, how you handle your packets.
Realistically you could use 1GB happily for your fully loaded empty server, and then upto 2MB for each client and then even with 1000 players your still only using 3GB, with VPS/Dedi's having as much as 8/12GB of ram that you can utilise theres no reason why you shouldnt use it, provided it actually helps make your server more efficient (ie. takes less time to access data when compared to loading from file/database).
Low memory usage != more efficient, equally High memory usage != more efficient, its all about finding the balance.
Just to further put this into context, you could fully load every item from your items table of your database into memory, your memory usage would go through the roof, but its likely that loading all of those items would take some time, and that accessing the right ones from memory could take longer than loading them from the database. So this would be a bad idea...