Ideal hardware?

General Discussions
#1

What is the ideal hardware for umbrel?

My node (http://amboss.ipayblue.com) with about 110M sat channel capacity is getting busier every day, and it looks like this is also reflected on load.
Here is a 6 hour chart of my load:
https://gyazo.com/07ebc0b791cdb669de4bab8b34e66774

I have a 1 GB SSD and 4x Intel® Core™ i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz processors. As you can see from the charts, the processor usage is usually between 90-100% and IOwait is between 3-15%. I am not sure if processor usage is high because of the processes are waiting for the SSD to read / write data or simply more / better processors would reduce the load.

What do you suggest, more CPU or an even better SSD?

1 Like
#2

The ideal hardware for a LN node is based on how many channels and how many routing you got in a certain time span.
You could have a RPi with 10 channels that work just fine for your own personal usage.
You could have a NUC/barebone with 100-200 channels that work just fine for medium routing.
You could have a strong powerful server with xCore and xRAM and xRAID disks that can make routing with hundreds of channels…

Is up to you what do you want to achieve.
From my personal experience with hardware for 25+ years in IT and at least 3 years running LN nodes, I would say that RPis are ONLY for personal use. Not more.

Processor is not so important in regular node usage, but RAM and SSD speed.
If you can use NVM disks would be really fast.
If you can allocate more swap memory would be even better.

4 Likes
#3

I have similar specs. Btw, can you check your umbrel containers with docker ps; docker stats in ssh and check if a container is restarting very often or having high resources usage. I have had issues before where a block corruption was not allowing my electrs server to run properly and it kept restarting taking almost 100% cpu. Fixed it by syncing the blockchain again.