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Running a small Lemmy instance on Pine64, is it recommended?

I am not looking to onboard thousands of users or host large communities, just my own and some family and close friends’ accounts. I don’t currently have a scalable homeserver setup (just a local Home Assistant instance on a Pi) and don’t have the space to put an old desktop running Proxmox on a cable.

I was browsing single-board computers and the Pine64 (2GB RAM) looks like a good deal. It seems more powerful than similarly priced Raspberry Pis (3B 1GB). Is it good for running a small Lemmy instance on?

EDIT: Thanks for the advice all, just bought an 8th gen i3 NUC (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM) to play around with Proxmox and VMs. Going to start off with migrating Home Assistant and then set up a Lemmy instance, and perhaps a static website too.

terribleplan ,
@terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li avatar

I am a big fan of “mini desktop” computers for this sort of task (my lemmy instance is running on one). You can usually pick them up used/refurbished for pretty cheap with decent specs: i5 or better processors, upgradeable RAM (SO-DIMM), M.2 or 2.5in SSD. They are quite small, and relatively low power. I have a few in my homelab, and one acting as my media-center PC in my living room.

Image to give an idea of size, appx. 7 inches square by 1 inch tall

F04118F OP ,

You’re right, just having one mini-pc with Proxmox and being able scale VMs between applications is a lot better than a collection of sbc’s. I will look at the used market.

empireOfLove ,
@empireOfLove@lemmy.one avatar

2gb will be limiting, and the database will kill SD cards quickly (like, a couple weeks kind of quickly) However if it’s just you and <100 other people it will not be stressed otherwise

chris ,
@chris@l.roofo.cc avatar

You should mount an external disk for your data. That should help keep your instance alive.

derek ,

Yeah, don’t use SD for something, that continuously writes data on it. One power outage and it will die.

Source: lost 2 sds on my OPi 3 lts.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

For little computers like the Pi and its clones, I’d recommend using a SATA SSD via USB rather than an SD card, unless your use case has very few writes. I’d recommend this cable: www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00XLAZODE/. It’s one of the ones that’s well supported by the Pi, and is what I use.

Edit: I recommended a SATA SSD rather than NVMe because you won’t really notice a major difference over USB, and some NVMe drives pull more power than the Pi’s USB ports can handle (SATA uses quite a bit less power).

F04118F OP ,

Thanks, this is what I am using now for Home Assistant, but overall it’s a bit expensive for the power you get with a Pi4.

F04118F OP ,

Thanks, I (of course after posting this) stumbled upon this discussion: sh.itjust.works/comment/114723

Seems like storage use is quite intense, and RAM usage exceeds the 150MB that the docs mention too. For storage, I would probably try to use a cloud option (AWS S3?) to prevent having to replace/add disks all the time.

Although it’s starting to look like more and more of a hassle and not that much benefit so far.

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