I am not looking to onboard thousands of users or host large communities, just my own and some family and close friends’ accounts. I don’t currently have a scalable homeserver setup (just a local Home Assistant instance on a Pi) and don’t have the space to put an old desktop running Proxmox on a cable.
I was browsing single-board computers and the Pine64 (2GB RAM) looks like a good deal. It seems more powerful than similarly priced Raspberry Pis (3B 1GB). Is it good for running a small Lemmy instance on?
EDIT: Thanks for the advice all, just bought an 8th gen i3 NUC (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM) to play around with Proxmox and VMs. Going to start off with migrating Home Assistant and then set up a Lemmy instance, and perhaps a static website too.
I am a big fan of “mini desktop” computers for this sort of task (my lemmy instance is running on one). You can usually pick them up used/refurbished for pretty cheap with decent specs: i5 or better processors, upgradeable RAM (SO-DIMM), M.2 or 2.5in SSD. They are quite small, and relatively low power. I have a few in my homelab, and one acting as my media-center PC in my living room.
You’re right, just having one mini-pc with Proxmox and being able scale VMs between applications is a lot better than a collection of sbc’s. I will look at the used market.
I second this. I used to use Raspberry Pis but one mini PC can do so much more and isn’t much more expensive.
Yeah, maybe I was rough on them but I killed like 2 Pis in a year running OpenELEC/LibreELEC (even with heatsinks) before I bought an Nvidia Shield (which was great until Google forced terrible things onto it and Nvidia seemingly stopped supporting it). I grabbed one out of my homelab and I’ve just been running straight Ubuntu on it for about 6 months at this point and wouldn’t dream of going back.
I’ve got a HP ProDesk G5 SSF I bought from eBay for $200, and love it. It’s got a Core i5-9500 which is more than enough power for me. I run a few things on it, like Blue Iris (in a Windows Server 2022 VM) for my security cameras, Home Assistant, Zigbee2mqtt, Node-Red, VictoriaMetrics, and a bunch of others.
Having said that… Depending on how much power it uses and how much power costs in your area, it can sometimes end up cheaper to use a VPS, and you get better enterprise-grade hardware and internet connections. You can get a good VPS for less than $50/year especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on Lowendtalk.com.
2gb will be limiting, and the database will kill SD cards quickly (like, a couple weeks kind of quickly) However if it’s just you and <100 other people it will not be stressed otherwise
For little computers like the Pi and its clones, I’d recommend using a SATA SSD via USB rather than an SD card, unless your use case has very few writes. I’d recommend this cable: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00XLAZODE/. It’s one of the ones that’s well supported by the Pi, and is what I use.
Edit: I recommended a SATA SSD rather than NVMe because you won’t really notice a major difference over USB, and some NVMe drives pull more power than the Pi’s USB ports can handle (SATA uses quite a bit less power).
Thanks, this is what I am using now for Home Assistant, but overall it’s a bit expensive for the power you get with a Pi4.
At least you can reuse the SSD for something else if you ever stop using the Pi. They make great portable drives (but you’d definitely want a case for that)
I was doing the same (running Home Assistant on the Pi) but these days I’m running Home Assistant on a HP ProDesk small form factor PC, mainly because I also wanted to run Blue Iris. The Pi is only my DNS server at the moment.
You should mount an external disk for your data. That should help keep your instance alive.
Yeah, don’t use SD for something, that continuously writes data on it. One power outage and it will die.
Source: lost 2 sds on my OPi 3 lts.
Thanks, I (of course after posting this) stumbled upon this discussion: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/114723
Seems like storage use is quite intense, and RAM usage exceeds the 150MB that the docs mention too. For storage, I would probably try to use a cloud option (AWS S3?) to prevent having to replace/add disks all the time.
Although it’s starting to look like more and more of a hassle and not that much benefit so far.
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Thanks for the advice all, just bought an 8th gen i3 NUC (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM) to play around with Proxmox and VMs. Going to start off with migrating Home Assistant and then set up a Lemmy instance, and perhaps a static website too.
