Folks,

I have an Intel N5095 2 GHz box, with 16 GB RAM and 500 GB sitting below my desk. It’s a teeny tiny box with no fan or anything.

I’m currently running Debian server on it with Portainer on top to run some *arr services. I’m thinking of running some more. But the device seems to groan under the weight of the services already running.

Was just watching a video about proxmox, and it seems to be a better solution if I don’t need to run Portainer on top of an OS. Maybe it’ll be lower resource usage?

So, thoughts? Should I change it up from Debian to proxmox? Or should I stick to what is already running? I am running Debian because I read somewhere that it’s the lowest resource hog of all Linux server options.

Alternatively, should I stick to Debian and portainer but use it with something like podman as it might use less resources than docker-ce?

  • eli@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    I run proxmox for my own homelab and another instance for very small services inside my LAN.

    Anyway, I have gotten into docker recently and my method so far has been to spin up a LXC container of just a base OS(like Ubuntu or Alpine or whatever) and then install docker and whatever else inside that container and then run my service.

    So I have one container per service. Now my problem is how to manage the docker side without having to go into each container individually. I have tried portainer but it’s not clicking with me.

    I’ve actually been trying to find a solution to just have docker on a bare metal OS install and that be my hypervisor, but I can’t get a clear answer on anything, so Proxmox seems to be my only option.

    Proxmox is a very solid option, but it is not “less intensive” than Debian since it is built on top of Debian. Proxmox does not install a desktop environment(it has a web GUI), so that may help with keeping resources low, but it isn’t some magical solution.

    I would recommend trying it 100%, there is a little bit of a learning curve getting to know Proxmox, but it’s the best hypervisor I’ve used for homelab so far.

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      8 days ago

      The server kinda stops completely responding when it’s doing a heavy download… so I can’t get to those stats. But the other commenter has recommended I use https://github.com/henrygd/beszel so I’ll check it out and see what the data reveals. I believe, based on how the system freezes up, that it must be the CPU hitting the roof.

      • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        I hope you find out that it’s a not very necessary service that is the culprit, so that you can simply skip it. :)

          • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            6 days ago

            Thermal throttling is when the system (usually the cpu) becomes so hot from the lack of cooling provided to it, that it limits its performance to save itself from certain death - going so far as performing a hard shutdown if the situation doesn’t improve or stabilize. AMD chips usually throttle at 80C, Intel chips 100C, but it could be a few different components. You need to run software that can properly read and report the temperature of various parts in your system to see if you might be hitting the throttling threshold.

            I know software to do this for windows, but not any for *nix.

            • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              temp

              I installed a thing called lm-sensors on debian and it shows me this during a time when the box is struggling -

              Every 1.0s: sensors

              coretemp-isa-0000 Adapter: ISA adapter Package id 0: +44.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C) Core 0: +38.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C) Core 1: +39.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C) Core 2: +39.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C) Core 3: +39.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

              acpitz-acpi-0 Adapter: ACPI interface temp1: +0.0°C (crit = +119.0°C)

              Seems to be working fine.

              Unless the thermal throttling limits are set by the BIOS and I’ll have to go looking into that by rebooting?

              Resources also seemed ok - RAM was 2 GB used out of 16 and all the cores were at 10-15% usage, according to htop.