I am currently looking for Thin Clients on ebay to use as my main server instead of the RPi 4 with an external USB drive.

I found decent offers for:

  • Dell Optiplex 3020M with i5-4590T 4GB RAM 120GB SSD
  • Dell Wyse 5070 with Celeron J4105 or Pentium Silver J5005 both with 8GB RAM 64GB SSD

Given the current prices of new hardware my questions are:

  • Should I go for 8GB RAM?
  • Or are 4GB RAM fine and I should take double the storage?

Things I want to run on this server:

  • Karakeep
  • FreshRSS
  • Paperless-NGX or Papra
  • Immich
  • Booklore

Because I plan to mostly use podman I tried to check for virtualization and all three suppoert Intels VT-x technolgy, will that be fine for my use case?

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    A slower CPU sucks, but swapping sucks even more. Is the ram upgradeable? You can get 16gb ddr3 sticks of ram. Idk how much EOL/the ram pocalypse has affected their pricing though.

    • theorangeninja@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      After a rather quick look it seems like the DDR3 prices are still kinda fine. I will consider that, thanks!

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Idk how much EOL/the ram pocalypse has affected their pricing though.

      I get mine from Memory Stock. Great service, good prices. I’ve never had a bad experience with them.

  • iggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    Containers don’t need VT/SVM (unless you’re doing something weird like Kata Containers)

      • iggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Correct (which is why I mentioned Kata, as that’s a container runtime backed by microvms, sort of like how AWS uses firecracker to run lambdas and “serverless” container workloads)

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.

    The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.

    Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.

    • theorangeninja@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Yeah power efficency should not be undervalued! But I read that the Wyse 5070 CPUs officially only support 8GB RAM so no big upgrades possible.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.

        • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          I think it depends. when you run many things for yourself and most services are idle most of the time, you need more RAM and cpu performance is not that important. a slower CPU might make the services work slower, but RAM is a boundary to what you can run. 8 GB is indeed a comfortable amount when you don’t need to run even a desktop environment and a browser on it besides the services, but with things like Jellyfin and maybe even Immich, that hoard memory for cache, it’s not that comfortable anymore.

  • Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    I know you didn’t mention video but if you think you might want to host jellyfin in the future, make sure your CPU supports hardware decoding for modern formats.

    For example, my lenovo mini pc with an i5-6500 has support for h265 but not h265 10bit or AV1, which makes playing those formats on some devices basically impossible without re-encoding the files.