this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Homelab

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For reasons unexplained, you have no homelab hardware, but $1,000 in cash earmarked for the purpose.

What are you buying, what are you installing on it, and how is it different from what you've done previously (i.e. lessons learned)?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm still a beginner at it, but I would say to not over prioritize cores. Ram will be your bottleneck first. I day this as someone with 36 physical cores and like 90% of them idle

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

u/diffraa , this is a key point.

At $dayjob, we use 4 GB per core for application workloads and it works well. Databases get 16 GB per core. Memcached gets 32 GB per core. In development we use 16 GB per core because there isn't heavy load.

My own homelab is built around a bunch of quad cores with 32 GB of memory. The memory has come in useful. Having 64 GB per quad core would be even better, but was not possible when I built the systems many years ago (I bought super cheap $40 motherboards with only two slots). For my initial purpose getting 2x 1 GB sticks would have been enough, but I'm glad I bought more as I use all the memory now.

If you don't know what you want to do, I would get 8 GB of memory per core at minimum, and in a lightly loaded homelab, 16 GB per core is totally reasonable. I would only get less memory if you know you're going to hit the CPUs hard with particular tasks that share memory or use little memory, and even then I would get minimum 4 GB per core.