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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

If you’re self-hosting, do you need 128GB of ram?

I suspect you don’t. I suspect a couple of beelinks could run your whole business (minus the GPU needs).

What I understood is that the author is hoarding them for the future - not because there is any need for it right now. You could argue that it's too much RAM even at end of server's useful lifetime. But who knows? What if he end up running a few dozen services on it at that time?

Honestly, the problem that they're preparing for, isn't any of our fault. This is inflicted upon the world by some very twisted business models, incentives and priorities. It's hard to predict how it will all end up. Perhaps the market will be flooded with tons of RAM that will have to be transplanted onto proper DIMM modules. Or perhaps we might be scavenging the e-waste junkyard for every last RAM IC we can find - in which case, his choice would be correct.

When we were space constrained, we built smaller. When we were block constrained, we build ssd’s. When we were graphics constrained, we built gpu’s. Now that we’re memory constrained, we’ll see some advancements in this area as well. 1TB ram chips are right around the corner.

The problem is the economic incentive. In all the prior cases you mentioned, their commercial interests aligned with our own - at least in part. This time however, I'm worried that they aren't concerned about burning down the world economy, at least in part, since their bottom line won't suffer for it.

For example, Micron didn't think about any alternatives for the consumer retail market. They just dumped it entirely.

If Ford stopped making cars…

You fail to grasp that if Micron decides the consumer market isn’t for them, others will gladly fill that void.

The economics behind this isn't rocket science. Micron left the retail market because it is more profitable for them to supply exclusively to the hyperscalers. Not because they can't supply the retail market or because it wasn't profitable. What makes you think that any other manufacturer is going to take a different decision? Why would they choose a market that offers less than the biggest bidder?

Someone will fill the void. Another company will sell ram to the retail market if the big players won't. More manufacturing abilities will open up. It's not like ram is becoming extinct. Someone will tool up and produce them for the retail market just as other brands have done in other sectors when the market shows a void.

Last I checked I could still buy Crucial RAM chips. In time, maybe it's Kingston. Or maybe Gigastone.

I've been running syncthing, HA, Samba, jellyfin, and some home made stuff on a Celeron NUC with 8GB. Works fine.

With probably 7GB of headroom

I run quite a few services with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client PC from 2018 with 4GB of ram.

I self-host and generally put 64GB of RAM in servers (DDR3, thankfully). Certain arrangements of Docker-based services simply chew up a lot of RAM.

I'd rather over-purchase on ram and never have to think about it again rather than try to carefully tailor the amount of memory in the machine based on the workloads I think I'll be running on it at the time of purchase. Fortunately my latest server upgrade was before the ram prices went insane.

I generally run “obsolete” machines and then just max them out on RAM and CPUs, stick a dual 10G card in the 16X slot, and shove the latest NVMe SSDs in the 4X slot and forget about it.

For bulk storage / logs I toss in a few of whatever the cheapest drives are right now.

Have lots of spares for failures… haven’t had one failure since 2019.

> I suspect you don’t

...today.

If you're self-hosting, do you need 640K of ram?

And you can upgrade in future to match your actual needs instead of wasting money trying to front load costs for no benefit.

You can buy a “lightly used” Dell Optiplex with 8gb RAM for like $40 which will cover all your self hosting needs today.

What's its power consumption?

Mini PCs/uSFF with an Intel i5 6500 generally use about 8-10W with low to moderate load, WiFi disabled.

Yup, and if you need something powerful by today’s standards you can grab a mini pc like this (1) one. Install arch or whatever, and go. Install k8s. Run a cluster of 16 nodes on this one little machine.

(1) https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-gti12-ultra-i9-129...

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