Bitcoin Forum

 
What is the minimum hardware for a full-node in 2017 that is not laggy and useful for the network ?

I see a lot of tutorial recommending a Raspberry Pi 2 - Model B v1.2 (https://www.adafruit.com/products/2358) that has a ARM Cortex-A53 with 1G RAM.
Is this enough nowadays ?

Would you advise having better specs ?

The hardware references I found are quite old :

BANANA-NODE: Everyone can set up a cheap Bitcoin full node with this tutorial! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=984947.0) March 10, 2015

Raspberry Pi 2 B - Prep, Hardening and Full Bitcoin Node Procedures (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219378.0) October 24, 2015


This thread is interesting but focused on running a full node on your main computer :

Updated instructions on how to run a full node, now available on Bitcoin.org (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1735766) January 01, 2017

This hardware looks interesting :

Orange pi+
https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-Pi-Plus-2E-SET8-Plus-2E-Power-Supply-Transparent-Acylic-Case-8GB-Class-SD-Card/32673932657.html
2GB DDR3
$60

https://bitseed.org/product/core/
1 GHz ARM Cortex A7 Dual Core with 1 GB of DRAM + 500Go
But $230 with international delivery and import taxes.

https://bitseed.org/product/bitseed-lite/
Same but 120GB HDD only
$196.5 with international delivery and import taxes.

 
I had already 2 advises  :

1 Go RAM is not enough today, 2 Go is recommended.
Raspberry Pi 2 B is not enough

Udoo x86 (http://www.udoo.org/udoo-x86/) is recommended.
2 to 8 GB RAM
2 to 2.56 GHZ

EDIT :

An excellent updated tutorial about hardware and installation in French (you may translate it) : https://bitcoinfullnodeonraspberrypi.blogspot.fr/2016/09/configuration-dun-noeud-bitcoin-sur.html (https://bitcoinfullnodeonraspberrypi.blogspot.fr/2016/09/configuration-dun-noeud-bitcoin-sur.html)

Orange pi+ is recommended.

Linux has zram (real-time RAM compression/decompression). It can help in scenarios with ram constraints. Essentially you are trading processing power (that you may have in excess), with RAM (that you lack).

There is also zswap where you trade processing power for reduced I/O operations while swapping to a medium, by compressing the swap data.

If one has something like raspberry, and its cpu is good (I have no idea whether it is or not), but lacks RAM, then they can trade the cpu power with compressed ram + compressed swap, and make the impossible => possible.

Another tradeoff that you may face, is in the selection of medium space. A minimum of 256gb (blockchain currently at >110gb which means the 128gb will be full very soon) seems inevitable, but even that can drop if you compress the partition and trade CPU time in realtime compression/decompression with storage space. A compressed partition might reduce space requirements for the blockchain by 20-30%, postponing a 256gb medium purchase - for when their prices drop. If you use a HDD, space is not such a problem but for cards, flash storage etc, it is.

I'm new to bitcoin.

I'm running a full node on a Dual core Intel Core2 Duo@2400Mhz 4G RAM.
Blockchain is on btrfs partition with lzo compression with 200G in total  111G being used. This partition is only for the blockchain.
I'm also using par=1.
At moment the load is 0.37 0.42 0.56
And the machine is doing more than that.

Im still running a Banana-Pi inspired by the thread from 2015. So far I can say the hardware is still good enough until Core 0.12.1
My first problems occours while trying to compile 0.13.0 when I was running out of memory. This issue could be soved by consultate the readme.
But from 0.13.0 the performance becomes worse and even with 0.13.1 that I have tried for some tests. Maybe there are some improvments coming up again with 0.14.0 so lets see when its going to be released  8)

Desktop or laptop hardware running recent versions of Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

125 gigabytes of free disk space

2 gigabytes of memory (RAM)

A broadband Internet connection with upload speeds of at least 400 kilobits (50 kilobytes) per second

An unmetered connection, a connection with high upload limits, or a connection you regularly monitor to ensure it doesn’t exceed its upload limits. It’s common for full nodes on high-speed connections to use 200 gigabytes upload or more a month. Download usage is around 20 gigabytes a month, plus around an additional 100 gigabytes the first time you start your node.

6 hours a day that your full node can be left running. (You can do other things with your computer while running a full node.) More hours would be better, and best of all would be if you can run your node continuously.