What do you consider Low End these days?

AnthonySmith

Recent events and TierHive tickets and things I have read here and other places really makes me wonder if my reality is aligned.

I assume my version of low end is on the lower end of the spectrum but I am recently questioning if my idea of the spectrum is wrong.

For me low end is now under 1GB ram, 1vCPU, I guess disk and network is not so important but 100mbit burst minimum.

I try to stay at 512mb or less on projects and optimise until I can't anymore then go up in 256mb increments.

I feel a sense of achievement if I can run something on 128mb

But I often see posts as if they want something small and cheap for a discord bot or something wanting 8GB ram and 4vCPU and I just think.... What ????

Anyway let's see what everyone else thinks.

cybertech

2GB DDR4 ram is the new minimum

AnthonySmith

@cybertech said:
2GB DDR4 ram is the new minimum

For what?

skorous

@AnthonySmith said:

@cybertech said:
2GB DDR4 ram is the new minimum

For what?

YABS

david3

I think its more about the cost of the service than the specs.

For me, for 2GB RAM, it should be around $20/year or less.

For 1GB RAM, around $10/year.

I prefer 2GB RAM for general purpose, even if I could squeeze it into 1GB, it would swap a lot.

For smaller things, less is fine. If its just a shadowsocks server, 128MB (or even 64MB sometimes) is plenty. I've one 1GB box that's just being used for shadowsocks now, and it really doesn't need that much, but I won it for free.

Otus9051

1-2vCPU
1G(or 2G is better because I run out of RAM on 1G)
Storage atleast 20-30G
Network min 100Mbit

2G RAM is slowly becoming the minimum because of how much app dependencies are increasing, for a seemingly normal basic app written in something like NodeJS (most Discord bots) they can have over 100 dependencies. The app itself might call for 5-10 directly but there's dependencies of dependencies of dependencies and so on, and they take up storage and RAM. Storage mostly on compile time tho.

TemporiousOne

It depends on your use case. For personal(and family) use, I've got a Nginx, Wireguard, Shadowsocks and Bitwarden backup running on a 128MB (low everything) Alpine instance on Tierhive. It runs well for my needs.

When playing with Google's free VPS many years ago, I was accustomed to using Ubuntu and it really needed 1GB with a big swap to do anything useful. 2GB would have been more comfortable for my then use case of running docker and testing DB2. So it's not a surprise that 2GB the default that people ask for.

20 years ago, we used to spec web servers at 1GB, App servers at 4GB, and DBs at 16GB. After working out how much ram is needed, we just multiplied it by 2 (sometimes 4) just for safety. Trying to squeeze every bit of juice from a low-end machine takes effort and comes with risk. Not everyone has the time, energy or risk appetite for extreme lowend-ness.

I enjoy figuring out how to run stuff on an absolute minimal config, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.

AnthonySmith

@Otus9051 said: app written in something like NodeJS (most Discord bots)

I see, I did not know people were writing discord bots in nodejs... explains a thing or 20...

Otus9051

@AnthonySmith said:

@Otus9051 said: app written in something like NodeJS (most Discord bots)

I see, I did not know people were writing discord bots in nodejs... explains a thing or 20...

A lot of them are still written in Python, but a great chunk of vibe-coded or just modern human-coded apps use NodeJS. If the bots are also big, like NotSoBot, they use Kubernetes to run their bots: https://notsobot.com/status [although notsobot is an outlier because it is a huge bot being used by a lot of people and it has a lot of functionalities that need compute, like ytdlp, image manipulation, etc.]

Advin

These days I equate "low end" to "good value" services. 4 vCPU 8GB RAM will cost $40-50/month at the bigger cloud providers, but you could probably find a provider here that would do it for $6-12/month. That's really just the spirit of "low end" to me, everyone wants to find the "best" deal.

I think it's just that these larger servers (e.g., 8GB RAM) have gotten a lot cheaper over time, hence why you might see more users asking about it.

AnthonySmith

@Advin said:
These days I equate "low end" to "good value" services. 4 vCPU 8GB RAM will cost $40-50/month at the bigger cloud providers, but you could probably find a provider here that would do it for $6-12/month. That's really just the spirit of "low end" to me, everyone wants to find the "best" deal.

I think it's just that these larger servers (e.g., 8GB RAM) have gotten a lot cheaper over time, hence why you might see more users asking about it.

Yeah, that's interesting. I guess, in fairness, the LE* movement was started on the up to $7, not how much RAM, I think we got fat on cheap RAM for so long now, though (that bubble burst) that the 2 things have actually forked in meaning, depending on which camp you are in.

A) I need 16GB RAM and want to pay as LITTLE as possible for it
I want to make this run in the lowest amount of RAM possible (and by extension expect to keep costs low)

Someone needs to register LowCostBox and start a new community fork

poei

Mo' Memory Mo' Problems.

Original ASM and C programmers were much more limited by their available resources. This forced them to get creative with their code to fit what they could into a smaller size (memory). Now, with on demand hyper-scaling, programmers (and vibe coders) don't really have to think of that when coding in Node.JS or Rust and such. There is far less constraints, which ultimately leads to more bloat and dependency in software now. I'm not sure if we are better, or worse off for it.

AnthonySmith

@poei true, but how much do you think the fact that you can trade a stick of ram for a car that will probably get you to work and back for a year mostly issue-free will impact that, or do you think everyone will just wait for a return to good times and change nothing, just suck up the cost in the meantime?