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What I found related to specs/resource requirements (memory, disk space,...) was :

  • These requirements for running a validator node and
  • In the polkadot wiki page the space required for an archive node.

I was wondering :

  1. if these are the latest, up to date requirements
  2. if there is a page with some more detailed specs for running an archive node (if necessary) and
  3. if these requirements change over time, is there a page where these specs are being updated too ? Or maybe the way to go would be to post a question in the "Polkadot/Kusama validator lounge" matrix chats mentioned here (for a validator node) ?
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    Note that we are looking into updating the minimum hardware in the near future, so keep your eyes and ears open.
    – Shawn Tabrizi ♦
    Commented Mar 22, 2022 at 14:48

3 Answers 3

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  1. The specs that you see in the wiki are up to date:
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz
Storage: A NVMe solid state drive. Should be reasonably sized to deal with blockchain growth. Starting around 80GB - 160GB will be okay for the first six months of Polkadot, but will need to be re-evaluated every six months.
Memory: 64GB ECC.

The size of a Polkadot Archive node is about 390Gb right now (block 9.5M).
For a pruning node I think the DB is under 100Gb. The main factor is the CPU though.

  1. An archive node is not time critical, since you are not participating in the consensus.
    You can therefore not loose money if you use subpar hardware. I think that is the reason why there is no reference hardware for archive nodes.

  2. They will be updated soon, but the concrete hardware is not decided upon yet.

This Stackexchange is a good place to ask such questions 😊

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  • The components seem incompatible: i7 is a desktop CPU and ECC is mostly available on server mobos that have Xeon CPU. What mobo do you use / recommend. Perhaps you could share some examples people are using currently?
    – DerekC
    Commented Apr 18, 2022 at 18:47
  • It would also be good to know why Intel is specified. There are AMD cpu (Ryzen PRO) and mobos that support ECC. What is Polkadot - running on Linux - using that requires Intel chipset?
    – DerekC
    Commented Apr 18, 2022 at 19:17
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    This is not a hard requirement but more of a recommendation. There is a bit more explanation in this question.
    – Oliver Tale-Yazdi
    Commented Apr 19, 2022 at 8:26
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Practically, when running a Kusama parachain (a program with both a live parachain client and a relay chain client), we give it 4 cores and 8 Gb RAM on GCP.

Two cores are sufficient for one client. Substrate can almost only utilize one core. So we give it two cores just leave a little room for redundancy. 4 Gb is nearly the minimum ram requirement for one clients. For smaller testnet, 2 Gb could be sufficient, but for larger chains like Kusama, 4 Gb is required. Btw, you'd better to give it 4 Gb swap just in case there's a ram usage spike.

Oliver gives a good analysis of the storage usage.

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Here are some extra information related to disk usage/database size for Kusama and Polkadot : https://paranodes.io/DBSize

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