From d26f4ca9bf216068f5bb30dbba4ea496149b1e83 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alexander Graebe Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2020 21:40:35 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] docs: add hardware requirement info Fixes blockstack/docs#956 --- .../understand-stacks/running-testnet-node.md | 23 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+) diff --git a/src/pages/understand-stacks/running-testnet-node.md b/src/pages/understand-stacks/running-testnet-node.md index 2c15254c..da633ab5 100644 --- a/src/pages/understand-stacks/running-testnet-node.md +++ b/src/pages/understand-stacks/running-testnet-node.md @@ -23,6 +23,29 @@ This tutorial will walk you through the following steps: ## Requirements +In order to run a node, some software and hardware requirements need to be considered. + +### Hardware + +Running a node has no specialized hardware requirements. People were successful at running a node on Raspberry Pis, for instance. +Minimum requirements are moving targets due to the nature of the project and some factors should be considered: + +- compiling node sources locally requires processing and storage resources +- replicating the chainstate requires significant memory allocation (1.3+ GB) +- chainstate size grows over time, increasing the memory requirements + +With these considerations in mind, we suggest hardware based on the general-purpose specification provided by GCP, the [E2 machine standard 2](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types#general_purpose): + +- 2 vCPUs +- 8 GB memory +- ~50-GB disk (preferably SSDs) + +It is also recommended to run the node with a publicly routable IP, that way other peers in the network will be able to connect to it. + +-> There is no difference in hardware you need to run a node versus a miner + +### Software + If you use Linux, you may need to manually install [`libssl-dev`](https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Libssl_API) and other packages. In your command line, run the following to get all packages: ```bash