Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
Minisforum makes good basic SFF PCs for super cheap.
Get a mini pc. If you can find a cheap intel NUC on ebay for example. Way more power in a compact form that doesn’t draw that much more power than a rpi… much less four of them.
Or even a thinkcentre, I got mine for less than $300 with 36gb ram, 1tb nvme ssd, and es i9
It was even closer to $200, and I had a plan to make a cluster out of these, but one this thing is powerful enough to do like anything, so I dropped the idea
Edit: also, about the power consumption, it’s very similar to rpi5 and at the same time can do so much stuff
I use an oracle free tier server for my heavy lifting (wordpress and owncloud), and have a pi4 on my fibre optic connection which is my storage.
Get a cheap SFF desktop, slap some cheap RAM in it and run KVM. It’ll be 10X better than a fleet of Pi’s.
If you don’t already use it, zram swap is great for providing a little bit extra oomph. If your server doesn’t have a lot of compressed data in memory, it can literally more than double your effective ram.
Zram swap is basically this: Turn all of your free ram into a swapdisk. Compress all access to that swapdisk.
So, it’s not using you storage, buy your memory. Most stuff in memory is usually highly uncompressed - so it compresses really well.
Instead of getting the additional space from disk, it’s getting it from compression.
Can you please explain to me the difference? How does a swapdisk compare to RAM? I don’t mind googling it but I highly doubt I’ll get a straightforward ELI5 style answer from there.
I would really appreciate it if you can elaborate, if you have the time that is.
Thank you.
