It’s ofcourse massively oversold, and you need quite some beefy hardware to be bottlenecked by a 1gbit link.
Software router, pfsense or opnsense.
Which provider do you have ?
So far do we have a good estimation of HW requirement to run one node?
I’m about to rebuild my retired HP Microserver with the following characteristics:
- CPU : AMD Turion II Neo N54L (2.2Ghz)
- RAM : 1*4GB (can be upgraded to 8GB)
- HDD : 1 SDD 120GB for the OS ; 2*4TB for data
- Internet speed : 1GB/s down / 500Mb/s up
What would be the limiting factor? CPU I guess?! How many nodes would I be able to run?
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Probably your router like I’ve just found out 
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That CPU is ancient, it will definitely be the limiting factor. My guess is 20 nodes maximum.
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That’s very optimistic. That cpu has 853 score on cpubenchmark.net.
I’d say try 2 and cross your fingers…
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It’s old. But it’s not terrible either! I’d say it’s a bit like a Intel Core Duo in a 15 year old laptop. And I’m guessing it would be able to run at least 20 nodes. Pure guess though.
I have a N40L kicking around so maybe I’ll put it to the test. Funny thing is I have no idea where it is. You’d think I’d know with it being the size it is!
In my experience you need around 750 cpubenchmark.net points per node on a fairly modern cpu.
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I see. Well I think there is something amiss because I can run 40 nodes no problem on a RPi4 with its ARM A72 4 Core which gets 834 on that same chart you see the Turion II having a score of 853. So I’m going to stick with my prediction of at least 20 nodes no problem.
I won’t be able to sensibly test more than 20 nodes with my terrible ADSL connection.
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General use benchmarks won’t say much, safenodes are specific use which behaves differently. One of my machines has Celeron N3350 which is 300 pts above ARM A72 and chokes on 20 nodes.
Number of cores is very important for running safenodes. It won’t show in top but because we run more nodes than cores, it means OS has to switch between tasks and that costs significant amount of CPU time. More nodes per core translates to more “power” lost to hopping between tasks.
I don’t have HW to test it properly, but if you take two CPUs with same architecture, one 2core@4Ghz and one 4core@2Ghz, the second one will be much better in running nodes.
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That’s a very good point! Yes, I’d forgotten that those Turions in the MicroServers are only 2 core and there could be a big effect from having more cores for this. That puts AMD CPUs at a big advantage as they tend to have more cores.
I still think 20 would be feasible on those Turions and it would be a lot more than just 1 or 2.
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I managed to get 30 nodes running on an old qx9650, but I had to turn it off cause of bandwidth issues on the router. I’m unable to get the launchpad working again now (to run lesser nodes), so will just wait for an updated release.
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There’s a big difference though between having 20 node processes running on a quiet network and keeping them running when things get hot.
In previous testnets I saw my xeon 12 core puke on 150 nodes when things got hot and everyone was hammering the net with massive uploads.
AMD’s are faaaarrrrr better than intels. Even comparable cpu’s with the same core count.
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In the future, is it planned for the node to be bigger than only 5GB? With my Turion, assuming I can only handle 20 nodes because of my CPU, does that mean that I will not ever be able to allocate more than 20*5GB space to Autonomi’ s network?
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Probably not, small nodes are beneficial because this assists decentralisation.
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I suggest spreading your node count (maybe as VM instance of your OS) across multiple IP addresses with multiport NICs and ensuring your egress and ingress router bandwidth is sufficient to handle the aggregate I/O , and have your ISP run that many external IP addressess matched 1:1 this way you scaleout node count on the same hardware across multiple IP addresses. Might be time to look into and price a colo 1/4 cage with an MSP/ISP that can set that up for you.
Although that is getting even further away from what the goal is supposed to be: getting lots of nodes into lots of people’s houses on spare resources. Not getting lots of nodes into one location or network using resources that have to be paid for.
I’ve looked at the options and it’s just about doable on my budget to set something up in a colo to run a few thousand nodes. It doesn’t really make sense economically but I would do it for giggles and if I thought it would be helping the project. But it wouldn’t really be. Just getting me up the leaderboard and getting me tokens and making it harder for others to get rewarded.
I think the better thing for me to do is focus on drumming up interest and getting some nodes running in people’s houses.
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There is logic in what you say. One would think that it is better to be a fish in an ocean than a whale in an aquarium 
When the pie is bigger even if you have a small percentage of the pie, you have more pie than if you have a large percentage of a small pie.
Most people are capable of understanding this concept, but it’s natural to want more for yourself, and that’s why we have the tragedy of the commons.
For myself, I have found that if I think of the wider community as part of my larger family, I am able to act long-term against my short-term self-interest. Knowing that we all descend from a common mother - the Mitochondrial Eve helps with that 
Privacy. Security. Freedom
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sure, however there are plans as I understand it to have dedicated relay nodes that earn rewards, if you want a stable network, at a minimum private reliable DAO also means at a minimum private 1/4 cage in a colo with full backup , dual homed carriers and likely dual homed substations to keep the network up and running , also I understand that Autonomi will have nodes running private DNS services, same thing required… , Simply think of all the private and Digital Ocean and AMZ instances out there right now… living in giant Data Centers… this is about having multiple facility supply chains of private reliable users to keep Autonomi Network up and running and able to provide relay links at scale as the node count sky rockets…, so call me a pragmatist , I can handle it 
The rewards for these types of nodes have to be meaningful to pay the rent in these highly reliable ‘relay node’ sites, and also offer an on ramp to the SMB and Enterprises running in these small and even micro colos…
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colo isn’t worth if you consider the upfront investments of having cables pulled to a meetme, the setup costs, the time you spend to go onsite, unpack, rack etc etc. You need to throw a massive amount of money into servers. Get your own datacenter networking equipment etc
And only then will there be the energy and bandwidth bills…
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