Can a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM handle my needs?

A Pi 5 8GB is very expensive once you buy the power supply, case, cooling, adapters, etc.. And you're stuck with ARM64 stuff which doesn't support some things.

Personally in your shoes I would spend $80 or so on a USFF PC with an 8th or 9th gen Intel CPU off ebay.

I replaced 4x Pi4 4gb with a single N95 mini PC with 16gb ram and wont look back.

Only PI left in my home is just running a 24/7 USBIP bridge.

the only reason to use a pi is if you need GPIO pins for custom devices.

Why not get an Intel N100? It’s about the same price and much better performance. Raspberry Pis is kind of overpriced these days.

In my humble opinion the Pi 5 is very expensive for what you get. You just don’t buy the board, you also buy the fan (cooling), case, power supply and SSD + connection adapter. For more or less the same price you can get a refurbished Intel NUC with a i3, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Or you can look for N100 at AliExpress. You will get the full blown experience and reliability + x86. And if you want to use Plex then you can make use of QuickSync for hardware encoding. I don’t understand why people bother with the Pi if they don’t need the GPIO. The extra power consumption of a NUC compared to the Pi 5 is minimal, in my case just 70 cents a month. Do yourself a big pleasure and get a NUC. The Pi is not the all in one cheap solution anymore it used to be. And x86 so no goofy community maintained as is ports to arm.

And you can upgrade a NUC with more RAM up to 32 GB if you pick a model which supports that amount.

Why not get a minipc? For the same cost you can get way more performance

I'm running my Matrix and Lemmy on a VM smaller than that, so it should be fine. Just don't run it off an SD card as the others have said, because that's going to be a database heavy workload which means loads of writes to storage.

If you don't need the I/O pins, look into a mini PC. In the US, used can easily get you something under $100 US. New would probably be around $100-$150.

If you get a low CPU, they idle around what the PI would be doing.

A PC would give you faster, more durable storage, inside of a case. And maybe memory upgradability, if you need it eventually.

A PC would be bigger, but some are not much bigger, especially if you add any USB dongles or external storage to the PI.

The YouTube channel "Hardware Haven" has a bunch of random old "junk" computers he's worked on.

@AlexPewMaster@lemmy.zip I'm in your situation. At the moment on my RPI 5 I'm hosting (via docker) the followings:

• lemmy
• mastodon
• gotosocial
• peertube
• pixelfed
• grav CMS
• matrix homeserver (synapse)
• gitea
• nextcloud And outside docker
• teleport cluster
• nginx for some reverse proxy
• minecraft java 1.20.1 server

For the sake of clarity, here is my docker ps -a | wc -l

cyberpingu@vega:~ $ docker ps -a | wc -l
36
cyberpingu@vega:~ $ 

Almost everything is behind a reverse proxy (on another machine, a rpi4 with KVM) with an argo tunnel. And again

top - 10:38:34 up 9 days, 14:33, 14 users,  load average: 1.06, 0.50, 0.34
Tasks: 544 total,   1 running, 543 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu0  :  2.0 us,  2.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st 
%Cpu1  :  1.3 us,  0.7 sy,  0.3 ni, 97.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st 
%Cpu2  :  2.6 us,  1.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 95.4 id,  0.3 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.3 si,  0.0 st 
%Cpu3  :  2.7 us,  0.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.0 id,  0.3 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.3 si,  0.0 st 
MiB Mem :   8053.5 total,    156.8 free,   5744.0 used,   2683.2 buff/cache     
MiB Swap:  16384.0 total,  11620.0 free,   4764.0 used.   2309.5 avail Mem 

So if the question is "Is it enough a RPI 5"? The answer is yes, it is enough (at least for moderate traffic OFC). If the question is "I have to buy hardware: is a RPI 5 the best choice?" the answer may vary depending on many things. As you've been told, if GPIO is not a problem, maybe a minipc is better.

You will need an NVMe adapter and a bigger SSD to store the Matrix database and it will put a lot of stress on the system if you join bigger rooms.

Otherwise it should be fine, although I personally would recommend skipping Matrix all together and rather install an lightweight XMPP server (and if you really need it a Matrix gateway for that).

You can try a mini PC, you mentioned Germany so for example this https://amzn.eu/d/0Evab2M I think that should be a bit more powerful than a Pi, but not sure by how much.

As someone that has only recently started selfhosting stuff, I can't offer much advice. But having bought an RPi5, which runs most of my things, I'll tell you this finding from my research. They're awesome, but the SD cards don't last long, so ideally you want to minimise the writes. I'm not sure a Matrix server allows you to do that. Though it absolutely can handle all of the above.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #615 for this sub, first seen 19th Mar 2024, 23:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I bought a CN62 Chromebox, and put MrChromebox's Bios on it -- I did the rounds comparing it with a Pi 4 and it was 2.5x faster, and could easily saturate my gigabit connection. It came with 16gb of storage, and 2gb of ram; but using ACTUAL DRAM slots. I could upgrade it to 16gb if I needed to down the line.

The whole thing, cost me like $45 shipped; power supply, storage, everything needed...and it's an X86 instruction set - so I can use whatever version of Linux I want, without any crazy Raspberry Pi specific patches/builds.

I personally recommend you to go for a GMKtec G3 instead, you will not regret it. Good luck.