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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?

Try to get as much ram as you can within your budget.

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.

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.

For ddr3 in the US it’s not terrible. The new stuff for datacenters is all ddr5, and anyone who can’t get ddr5 is settling for ddr4, so ddr3 should be relatively cheap and available.

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.

Idk how much EOL/the ram pocalypse has affected their pricing though.

I get mine from Memory Stock. Great service, good prices. I’ve never had a bad experience with them.

Thanks a lot for the heads up!

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.

After a rather quick look it seems like the DDR3 prices are still kinda fine. I will consider that, thanks!

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 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…

Seems like a lot of ram for immich.

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.

Containers don’t need VT/SVM (unless you’re doing something weird like Kata Containers)

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 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.

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.

I know you didn’t mention video but if you think you might want to host jellyfin in the future, make sure your CPU supports hardware decoding for modern formats.

For example, my lenovo mini pc with an i5-6500 has support for h265 but not h265 10bit or AV1, which makes playing those formats on some devices basically impossible without re-encoding the files.

Just throwing this in here as another thing to consider - instruction set. From a quick check (so I’m happy to be told I’m wrong) the Celeron & Pentium options don’t support AVX. That means some stuff - and I’m giving a hard stare at MongoDB here, but there will be others - is not going to run, or at best you’re going to be either stuck with old versions or recompiling yourself from source.

(I don’t know if any of your apps require Mongo or AVX, but I was bitten by this in the past and it was one of the main reasons I eventually upgraded one of my small clusters.)

Thanks a lot! So only for VMs?

I think I never heard about AVX before, what is it? And is it a newer technology or why do they both don’t support it?

Advanced Vector Extensions instruction set; introduced with Sandy Bridge in 2011, but not included in Pentium/Celeron branded processors even after then for reasons best known only to Intel.

Mongo is the application that has most irritated me by requiring it, but I doubt it’s the only one.

Correct (which is why I mentioned Kata, as that’s a container runtime backed by microvms, sort of like how AWS uses firecracker to run lambdas and “serverless” container workloads)