On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 07:39:28PM +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 12:43:57PM -0400, Miles Fidelman wrote: > > 2. If you have any expectation of providing any services - even > > something as basic as hosting an email list, you can easily swamp a > > desktop/laptop class machine. You probably want to look at something > > Xeon based. > > I have never, ever needed something Xeon based, and I've provided basic > services on low-spec VPSes for a very long time.
Some of the statements in this thread have been quite exaggerated. You can run a mailing list on a 486. (I mean, you *could* back when you could actually run Linux on a 486... no modern Linux kernels support that old CPU any more.) At its heart, a mailing list service is quite simple, and does not use a lot of resources. You need an MTA, of course, which is configured to receive and send (and therefore queue up) email. Then you just need a mailing list program which is invoked when a designated address receives a new email. The typical action will be "queue up a bunch of outgoing messages", and then the MTA sends them out. It only needs a few megabytes of RAM, and not much CPU. The bottleneck on a mailing list service will be the time spent waiting on network I/O while talking to other mail servers (and DNS) around the world. Not local memory or CPU. Things only get complicated if you try to do spam detection. Which, to be fair, you probably would want if it's an open mailing list publicized to the world. If it's a private mailing list that you only maintain for communications with your family or whatever, you probably don't need it. Simply disallow incoming messages from non-subscribed addresses. If you're "swamping" a modern desktop PC by running a small- to medium-sized mailing list, you've probably done something very, very wrong. A web server with static content is pretty light as well. Obviously it will depend on how many "clicks" you get per day, and what kind of content you're offering (i.e. how big the pages are), but a small web server that gets, let's say, a thousand hits per day (that's about one hit every minute) will not even place a noticeable load on a modern desktop or laptop PC. On a busier web server, the bottleneck will often be your upload speed, especially if you have larger files (images, audio, video, large data sets). The amount of RAM and CPU used for static content is still quite small, but you can easily max out a typical home Internet's upload speed. I believe Gene has experienced this.
