Hey!
I’ve been running some nodes for a while now (big kudos to @bochaco for his formicaio app). I am currently running 5 nodes but that is just a random chosen number.
Is there a way to calculate the optimum amount of nodes given the hardware & connection that you have? If not, is this something that is being worked on or going to be automated at some point?
My observations are that if you take the Multithread Rating of your processor from https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and divide by 50 you get the number of nodes you can run. With the 50% processor limit at the moment you have to divide by 2 for the final result.
Keep in mind that after a certain number of nodes the RAM consumption goes up, currently with 300 nodes my nodes consume 150 GB of RAM, while with 150 nodes it is no more than 60 GB…
Also keep in mind that 1 node currently uses about 0.4-0.5 Mbps upload/download. Another limitation for most people is the router, how many connections it can handle. A router with 128 mb ram, according to my observations, supports about 50 nodes. That’s why I personally use bridge mode, where there are no restrictions from the router.
If you consider all these factors with your specific case, you will see how many nodes you can run.
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One issue is the router.
Without knowing what your router is capable of then any calculation can only give a suggested maximum number.
Most of the time its a case of starting nodes a few (1 to 5) at a time with around 3 minutes between each node start. Then see how your hardware (cpu/memory usage) goes.
One overriding calc is each node requires 35GB of disk space to be available to a max of 80% of your drive. IE 20% should be left free