So I've been digging for a while, read the white paper, done my homework and no matter how many times I've seen the question asked I've never seen much of a straight answer when it comes to node specs.
I've seen vague posts about how people hoped their Intel i7 or AMD setup would be would be sufficient but people posted very few specs other than basic info about their processor type and that they hoped it would be enough. I've read posts about people hosting 40 core VPS cloud servers, and even a gentleman who wanted to build a rig using 30 Raspberry Pi 3's.
To the best of my knowledge with the research I have done here's what I know so far :
- An Ubuntu Linux Distro is the preferred OS.
-- (there is no Windows hosting software as of yet unless you run a Linux VM in Windows) - The software is CPU only based and there is no GPU support as of yet.
-- (this confused me a bit as CPU's are well known to be terrible with OpenCL vs a GPU.) - Nodes wait in a set cue before they are allowed to submit their POW contribution.
-- (POW must be submitted in the brief time allotted or the node concedes its spot and is placed back in cue) - POW must be submitted quickly, accurately, and with a unique ID
-- (Using the same ID twice is viewed as an attempt to soft fork) - Nodes with duplicate ID's that submit work are highly penalized if and when they are discovered.
-- (Duplicate node ID's are subject to total asset forfeiture and concede their shares to the discovering party) - When submitting POW, speed of submission is paramount.
-- (This helps to ensure a low latency network with very high speed blockchain confirmations.) - Almost all mining of STEEM was done prior to launch
-- (This pre-mining was used to generate the capitol needed to keep the platform funded prior to launch)
Those were a majority of the key points I was able to gather but so far I have been at a loss when it comes to actual system specs being used by the people who have been running nodes long term. Why no one will post their actual rig specs is a bit mind boggling to me because most people are proud to show off their specs. My assumption was that most are using easy to scale cloud hosting services but no one has seemed to confirm this is the method preferred by the majority of long standing hosts.
If anyone out there who has run a long term seed node, witness, or miner could help me put this final piece together I would be much appreciated. I have plenty of bandwidth at my disposal but am at a bit of a loss as to the hardware specs people prefer. The lack of GPU support would seem to imply that people are either running several multi core CPU's or cloud based hosting due to the inefficient nature of CPU's and absence of pools.
The white paper touched on why this was so but as of yet I have not been able to get a straight answer from any confirmed hosts or my research. I'm posting this in the hope that someone in the community could help me out with their actual node specs, or at least point me in the right direction so I can further research what is necessary to run a successful node to participate in the project.
Thank you in advance for any assistance provided. It would be very much appreciated.
Sincerely,
Alifton
Content is getting absolutely lost on the site right now, I stumbled on this by doing some googling myself.
I've done mining in the past, and yes, everything is bound to CPU usage. While I was mining, I was running 32 core machines and didn't care much about the RAM or disk (simply because they had way more than I needed).
From what I understand of the witness nodes - I don't think they chew too much CPU, but they need a bunch of RAM. I think 8gb right now would skirt by (barely), and it will soon outgrow it. 16-32gb would probably get you through the next few months. Hopefully some optimization is done in the future and RAM usage won't be so intense.
I'd recommend jumping into steemit.chat and joining #witness. It's pretty quiet most days, but I'm sure you could get questions answered there more easily. I honestly think no one answered you simply because no one saw this post (which is a problem of it's own).
@jesta Thank you so much for the reply! I honestly do hope no one answered because my post got buried so fast. I'm super amazed you found it on Google though?
I'd have to agree with you that posts or getting so disorganized because of the way they're only tagged and not sorted into sub's that a lot of good posts are simply getting buried long before they're even seen.
Heh, there's not much on google when you look for
site:steemit.com witness node. I think that's how I stumbled on it!Lol, now you see why I cracked jokes about a secret society or Cabal being in charge of the nodes. If Google found me asking for help before it actually found you help there's a serious lack of info out there about nodes and their specs.
Pretty much as expected and mentioned above.
The only acknowledgement of my sincere question was from dozens of bots, after which I could pretty much hear a pin drop. I figured I'd wait about 24 hours for a response (or at least a valid human to point me in the right direction) but this post was either buried before it was seen or simply ignored by anything but bots...
This post was never meant to be click-bait and was a genuine and sincere question on how I can help out and participate. I would have been fine with zero upvotes and just a simple reply because this post isn't about the money, it's was made in an attempt to support Steem as a platform not fatten my wallet.
It almost as is if running a seed node, witness, or supporting the network with hardware instead of content is a secretive/frowned upon endeavor.
No one likes to talk about it, mention it, or almost refuses to acknowledge the necessity of doing so to keep the network running and the blockchain alive and well as the network continues to grow...
I'll give this sort of question another shot later and try that tagging some of the more well known hosts to see if the Cabal is willing to talk or still wishes to remain a secret society.
Because so much time has passed I can't remove the comment about no one replying, but I did want to give a big shout out to @jesta for being the one human to answer my post after the Bot Swarm. I have since tracked down a Windows based client for hosting a Witness Node and Steem Miner v-12.2.
The exact algorithm used has been left as a bit an enigma on purpose even though the source has been released. If you're not a coder good luck with figuring it out because the whole deal is amazingly simple yet terribly complex at the same time. I'm linking the White Paper here because it does a much better job of explaining than I would.
As an added update here's the answer to my own question:
Now that I've been up and running for over a day, here's a decent idea of what one can expect .
I'm sure anyone with a newer i7 would stomp those stats into the ground but I've only tested mining out on the one machine so far. No idea how the software compiled for Windows 10 deals with hyper threading yet...
Seriously? As the OP I have 3 upvotes and your one liner of "Upvoted" has 40? This right here is a prime example of bot's that are out of control...