I am currently looking for Thin Clients on ebay to use as my main server instead of the RPi 4 with an external USB drive.
I found decent offers for:
- Dell Optiplex 3020M with i5-4590T 4GB RAM 120GB SSD
- Dell Wyse 5070 with Celeron J4105 or Pentium Silver J5005 both with 8GB RAM 64GB SSD
Given the current prices of new hardware my questions are:
- Should I go for 8GB RAM?
- Or are 4GB RAM fine and I should take double the storage?
Things I want to run on this server:
- Karakeep
- FreshRSS
- Paperless-NGX or Papra
- Immich
- Booklore
Because I plan to mostly use podman I tried to check for virtualization and all three suppoert Intels VT-x technolgy, will that be fine for my use case?
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I would go with a refurbished Lenovo TinyPC with a quad/hexacore and some 16 GB RAM. These used to go for 200-300 EUR, but this might have changed recently. I run an AMD Fujitsu thin client as my opnsense firewall.
Containers don’t need VT/SVM (unless you’re doing something weird like Kata Containers)
A slower CPU sucks, but swapping sucks even more. Is the ram upgradeable? You can get 16gb ddr3 sticks of ram. Idk how much EOL/the ram pocalypse has affected their pricing though.
Immich needs RAM so opt for more RAM if possible. I’m using Yunohost on an old box and have 8GB and Immich uses about 4-5 with all advanced features off.
I don’t know what up with your Immich instance but this seems like a lot of RAM usage for me. I have 45 docker containers, including Immich, running on a 10 yo NUC with 8 GB of RAM and that’s not an issue… I use 4,7 GB total in this instant.
Seems like a lot of ram for immich.
its probably hoarding it as “cache” when it thinks no other program needs it. maybe it would release some when the system has memory pressure, but this is terrible because those mechanisms are reacting very slowly
I’m running Immich on an old ThinkCentre with the default feature set. Currently looking at:
- Server: 1.4 GB
- ML: 288 MB
- Valkey: 8 MB
- Postgres: ~500 MB
There is a bit more overhead for the control plane and cloud-native PG operator/backup pods but my instance fits comfortably inside a ~4GB allocation.
Well ok let me clarify, Yunohost says during install it could use up to so with a lot of the stuff disabled I’m sure it’s not a full 5gb.
I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.
The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.
Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.
Yeah power efficency should not be undervalued! But I read that the Wyse 5070 CPUs officially only support 8GB RAM so no big upgrades possible.
At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.
I think it depends. when you run many things for yourself and most services are idle most of the time, you need more RAM and cpu performance is not that important. a slower CPU might make the services work slower, but RAM is a boundary to what you can run. 8 GB is indeed a comfortable amount when you don’t need to run even a desktop environment and a browser on it besides the services, but with things like Jellyfin and maybe even Immich, that hoard memory for cache, it’s not that comfortable anymore.
Try to get as much ram as you can within your budget.
