Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand what keeps such admins from migrating to containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?

  • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
    161·
    3 days ago

    All my services run on bare metal because its easy. And the backups work. It heavily simplifies the work and I don’t have to worry about things like a virtual router, using more cpu just to keep the container…contained and running. Plus a VERY tiny system can run:

    1. Peertube
    2. GoToSocial + client
    3. RSS
    4. search engine
    5. A number of custom sites
    6. backups
    7. Matrix server/client
    8. and a whole lot more

    Without a single docker container. Its using around 10-20% of the RAM and doing a dd once in a while keeps everything as is. Its been 4 years-ish and has been working great. I used to over-complicate everything with docker + docker compose but I would have to keep up with the underlining changes ALL THE TIME. It sucked, and its not something I care about on my weekends.

    I use docker, kub, etc…etc… all at work. And its great when you have the resources + coworkers that keep things up to date. But I just want to relax when I get home. And its not the end of the world if any of them go down.

    • Miaou@jlai.luEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Assuming you run Synapse, that uses more than 1.5GB RAM just idling, your system has at the very least 16GB of RAM… Hardly what I’d call “very tiny”

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        …ok so Im lying about my system for…some reason?

        Synapse looks like its using 200M right now. It jumps to 1 GB when being heavily used, but I only use it for piefed and a couple of other local rooms. Honestly its not doing so much for us so we were thinking of getting rid of it. Its irritating to keep having to set up new devices and no one is really using it.

        Peertube is much bigger running around 500MB just doing its thing.

        Its a single family instance.

        # ps -eo user,pid,ppid,cmd,pmem,rss --no-headers --sort=-rss | awk '{if ($2 ~ /^[0-9]+$/ && $6/1024 >= 1) {printf "PID: %s, PPID: %s, Memory consumed (RSS): %.2f MB, Command: ", $2, $3, $6/1024; for (i=4; i<=NF; i++) printf "%s ", $i; printf "\n"}}'  
PID: 2231, PPID: 1, Memory consumed (RSS): 576.67 MB, Command: peertube 3.6 590508 
PID: 2228, PPID: 1, Memory consumed (RSS): 378.87 MB, Command: /var/www/gotosocial/gotosoc 2.3 387964 
PID: 2394, PPID: 1, Memory consumed (RSS): 189.16 MB, Command: /var/www/synapse/venv/bin/p 1.1 193704 
PID: 678, PPID: 1, Memory consumed (RSS): 52.15 MB, Command: /var/www/synapse/livekit/li 0.3 53404 
PID: 1917, PPID: 645, Memory consumed (RSS): 45.59 MB, Command: /var/www/fastapi/venv/bin/p 0.2 46680
    • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      31·
      3 days ago

      Oh so the other 80% of your RAM can sit there and do nothing? My RAM is always around 80% or so as its caching stuff like it’s supposed to.

          • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            Welp OP did ask how we set it up. And for a family instance its good enough. The ram was extra that came with the comp. I have other things to do than optimize my family home server. There’s no latency at all already.

            It spikes when peertube videos are uploaded and transcoded + matrix sometimes. Have a good night!

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Freshrss. Sips resources.

        The dd when I want. I have a script I tested a while back. The machine won’t be on yeah. Its just a small image with the software.

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Couple of custom bash scripts for the backups. Ive used ansible at work. Its awesome, but my own stuff doesn’t require any robustness.