I’m thinking of running a node, what system specification is required? Any help?
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The specification depends on the volume of transactions, which will increase as more dApps are deployed on Algorand.
This answer has been written early Feb 2021.
With the current volume of transactions, the most important is to have a disk that is fast enough.
HDD are no more sufficient, you need an SSD, or if you are on Google Cloud, balanced persistent disks are sufficient.
The size of the disk depends on whether you want your node to be archival or not. Here are the current sizes I have (where the log files are not removed):
- MainNet non-archival: 5.4GB
- MainNet archival: 304GB
- TestNet archival: 210GB
You can run a non-archival MainNet node with 1 vCPU and 2GB of RAM (although I am not sure you can do fast catchup in that setting). 1GB of RAM is definitely too low. I would say 4GB or 8GB of RAM is recommended.
I have seen people running non-archival MainNet nodes on Raspberry PI 4B too.
You can also ask people on Discord for real-life experiences.
In production, I would recommend higher specs to get a more robust experience.
Finally, note that for most advanced queries, you need an indexer too.
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Thank you Fabrice. That’s to say I’ll need an SSD of about 500GB at least, and a minimum of 8GB RAM.
Only if you want an archival node and It’ll grow past that 500 within a year.
I’m looking for the best sys to do that. Thanks
Also, I think that if you want an archival node, you most likely also want an indexer.
8GB RAM should be sufficient for both algod and indexer.
I don’t have the disk use for indexer for just MainNet.
But for TestNet + MainNet, the indexer currently uses 343GB of disk.
My guess is that for MainNet, the indexer currently uses around 200GB of disk.