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.
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.
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.
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.
I should add more ram soon because Im running 30 services on 8GB atm and looks like Im about to hit the wall. Services I run atm are pihole, nextcloud, wireguard server, arr stack, jellyfin, homeassistant and more.
It sounds like it could easily run these. You could probably get away with a newer raspberry pi for them so the nuc should have no issues.
For reference the heaviest thing for me has been Home assistant os, which needs dedicated ram and cores for it’s VM. I’ve had no issues with running almost a dozen services on a 4790k based system along HA including: Immich, plex, radarr/sonarr/prowlarr/etc, usually a dedicated game server for Valheim or Minecraft or something, and some other lighter services.
I think ram (16gb) is going to be the limiting factor in my case but I haven’t hit that limit yet
I just use docker desktop for that, it shows memory usage.
For example I tried immich and saw that it takes 3 gb of ram to host a gallery with a single image
ram is really the limiting factor for most servers
if you’re gonna have less than 5 users on the services they’re probably not all going to be used at the same time so cpu usage will depend on which are being hit at the moment
none of the services you’ve listed are particularly heavy so you’ll be good for those and a bunch more no problem
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
It’s very hard to say anything definitive, because many of those can generate different load depending on how much traffic/activity it gets (and how it correlates with other service usage at the same time). Could be from minimal load (all services for personal use, so single user, low traffic) to very busy system (family and friends instance, high traffic) and hardware requirement estimates would change accordingly.
As you already have a machine - just put them all there and monitor resource utilization. If it fits - it fits, if it doesn’t - you’ll need to replace (if you’re CPU-bound, I believe CPUs are not upgradeable on those?) or upgrade (if you’re RAM-bound) your NUC. You won’t have to reinstall them twice anyway.
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.
