Hi y’all. I’ve got an Intel Nuc 10 here. I want to run a few apps on it, like BitWarden, PiHole, NextCloud, Wireguard, and maybe more, just for my own use, inside my home.
Is there a way to guage whether the hardware is up to the task in advance? Like, if love to be able to plan this by saying, “this container will use x MB of ram and 5% of the cpu” and so on?
I want to run everything on this one PC since that’s all I have right now.
EDITED TO ADD: T****hank you all! Great info. :thumbsup
Torque it until you hear the crack, then back a quarter turn
I don’t have an answer for you, but I will tell you from my experience, you can probably run a lot more on that thing than you might think.
I run all of my services on docker and I think I have 30+ services up at all times. What you should remember is that even under your most demanding workload, you’re probably only hitting like 5 services at a time while the rest sit idle. And if you are picking good, efficient apps (I really like the linuxserver.io apps), they’re not pulling much under load and certainly not while idling.
Your NUC sounds much more capable than my BeeLink and mine doesn’t break a sweat. The other commenter had it right, just keep adding stuff until you see a degradation of performance, I’m yet to hit one.
I agree. Run everything you want and then when you see performance degradation then you’ll know the limits of your hardware based on your workloads.
You already have the NUC so why not push it’s limits? The alternative is to try and guestimate your workload needs and buy matching hardware… which is very difficult.
To add to this with another example: my server runs
- jellyfin
- Nextcloud
- gitea
- Monica (a CRM, look it up on awesome-selfhosted)
- vaulwarden (rust implementation of Bitwarden)
- code-server
- qBitTorrent-nox
- authelia (2FA)
- pihole
- smbd
- sshd
- Caddy
In total, I’m using about 1.5GB out of 6GB of RAM (with another 1GB out of 16GB of swap being used), and the idle CPU usage is only 1%-ish (i5-3470 with the BIOS-settings set to power saving).
Even on very old and low-powered hardware, you can still run a lot of services without any problems.
CPU wise: Monitor load average as you load services. If it stays below the number of cores you are fine. That being said nuc 10 has a 6 core cpu Its more than OK for a barebones. For reference I’m running smooth on a raspberry400 4 GB RAM.
Vaultwarden
nginx webdav
Photoprism
Librephotos
Owntracks
Traccar
Monocker
Brave go-aync
Mozilla sync
Wallabag
radicale
Baikal
Ncfpm
Wireguard
Jellyfin
Rsstt
Joplin webview
Just fine
So you’ll be fine
For comparison, I’m running about a hundred containers on a 9 year old laptop easily (i7 4700 HQ with 16GB ram), I’m sure I can run many more
Is it running 24/7?
Im currently thinking of using my old laptop for this, but im scared it may get hot
Although i only got core i5 something and a 4gb ram ( asus k46cb )
It is running 24/7 yes, temps are stable and only really goes up when I’m home and actively doing things that would make it go up (like watching jellyfin). It runs with the lid closed and screen off.
You can always use one of those laptop stands with coolers underneath, or even without coolers, just having it lifted may improve airflow too. I did monitor the temps the first few days but it really doesn’t seem to be an issue, CPU temps at the moment is around 50 C, GPU is disabled as it’s old and can’t even be used to transcode anything.
You can always just use your laptop to try it out, see where it goes and then decide to spend money on something better and more suited to your needs.
I just slowly add more services and watch my RAM and CPU.
For example, my setup is an older laptop for processing and I have a NAS for storage. The laptop has a 5th gen i5 with 8GB of RAM with a Linux OS. It’s currently running 19 containers.
Just monitor it and play around. You’ll get a feel of what your equipment can handle.
