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

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@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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

  • empireOfLove@lemmy.one
    0·
    1 year ago

    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@l.roofo.cc
      0·
      1 year ago

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

      • derek@lemmy.one
        1·
        1 year ago

        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@upvote.au
      0·
      1 year ago

      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: https://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@feddit.nlOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.