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I'm about to start syncing node on the server, do you know if there are any requirements to the server, like CPU or GPU and most of all, free disk space.

Any tips about syncing on server?

Cheers!

EDIT: NOT TO MINING PURPOSES.

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  • What node software are you planning on running? OS preferences? Full chain or pruned? Lifespan of machine? Hosting location? Uptime requirements? – lungj Sep 28 '17 at 15:43
  • Re syncing: do you already have a copy of the blockchain you can trust? – lungj Sep 28 '17 at 15:51
  • Well, I'm not sure, I'm planning to use go implementation on ubuntu server. Not sure if pruned or not, because if it's pruned server could be vulnerable for attacks, right? Cloud server and 24h uptime :) It's going to be 1st sync – Maarduk Sep 28 '17 at 16:03
  • Sounds like this is a hobby machine. My answer below reflects this; you might get two nines of uptime with this answer. – lungj Sep 28 '17 at 16:22
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The full blockchain is over 200GB. So long as you have even a relatively modest desktop CPU (or single core of one in a virtualized cloud environment), you should have no difficulty staying in sync, CPU-wise with the blockchain (at least until sharding comes around). go-ethereum is happy with a few gigabytes of RAM (I haven't used it in nearly a year, but it was quite happy on an Ubuntu VM with 4 GiB of RAM until the state-bloat attack.

The blockchain can currently grow at a maximum of about 100KB/block with the current gas limit; assuming a block time of 15s after the ice age is... frozen, that's another half a gigabyte per day. So, to be safe (but without accounting for possible growth due to sharding), set aside about 200GB/year you want to keep your server running in addition to the existing 200GB. You'll want/need this to be on an SSD to stay in sync. Your OS' size is relatively negligible to this.

There is no need for a GPU.

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  • Btw you previously said "Re syncing: do you already have a copy of the blockchain you can trust?", during inital syncing do you recommend adding bootnodes? – Maarduk Sep 28 '17 at 20:04
  • I asked because you could otherwise copy in the blockchain from a trusted computer to avoid waiting for sync. – lungj Sep 28 '17 at 20:16
  • Can you add any information regarding which OS (windows, linux mac osx) would be most viable? Some people say Windows because you can program the hardware at a much finer degree and with much more ease? Do you have anything you recommend? @lungji – ConstantFun Jun 7 '18 at 8:48
  • @ConstantFun Not sure what you mean by “viable”. All of them are capable of running a node. I would think that Linux gives you the greatest degree of control over hardware (after all, you can just take an existing device driver and modify it or start something from scratch without worrying about permissions in the OS - and then tune the kernel if your driver still doesn’t play nicely), but not sure how that’s relevant to running a node. – lungj Jun 7 '18 at 12:54

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