On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 4:25 PM james <gar...@verizon.net> wrote: > > Yea, I was not clear. I'd run the mail-server, on a 'cluster' (4 or > more), not an individual pi-board unless it was beef up, processor and > ram wise. Gig E would also be on my list. >
Unless you have some niche need I wouldn't generally run servers on Pis. The biggest issue with ARM is that all the cheap platforms are starved for RAM, and RAM is one of the biggest issues when running services. And of course the Pi in particular has IO issues (as do many other cheap SBCs but this is less of an ARM issue). The RAM issue isn't so many an ARM issue as a supply/demand thing - the only people asking for 64GB ARM boards are big companies that are willing to pay a lot for them. I do actually run a few services on Pis - DNS, DHCP, and a VPN gateway. That's about it. These are fairly non-demanding tasks that the hardware doesn't struggle with, and the data is almost entirely static so an occasional backup makes any kind of recovery trivial. The only reason I run these services on Pis is that they are fairly fundamental to having a working network. Most of my services are running in containers on a server, but I don't want to have to think about taking a server down for maintenance and then literally every IOT device in the house won't work. These particular services are also basically dependency-free which means I can just boot them up and they just do their jobs, while they remain a dependency for just about everything else on the network. When you start running DHCP in a container you have more complex dependency issues. A fairly cheap amd64 system can run a ton of services in containers though, and it is way simpler to maintain that way. I still get quick access to snapshots/etc, but now if I want to run a gentoo container it is no big deal if 99% of the time it uses 25MB of RAM and 1% of one core, but once a month it needs 4GB of RAM and 100% of 6 cores. As long as I'm not doing an emerge -u world on half a dozen containers at once it is no big deal at all. Now, if I needed some server in some niche application that needed to be able to operate off of a car battery for a few days, then sure I'd be looking at Pis and so on. -- Rich
