Folks,
I have an Intel N5095 2 GHz box, with 16 GB RAM and 500 GB sitting below my desk. It’s a teeny tiny box with no fan or anything.
I’m currently running Debian server on it with Portainer on top to run some *arr services. I’m thinking of running some more. But the device seems to groan under the weight of the services already running.
Was just watching a video about proxmox, and it seems to be a better solution if I don’t need to run Portainer on top of an OS. Maybe it’ll be lower resource usage?
So, thoughts? Should I change it up from Debian to proxmox? Or should I stick to what is already running? I am running Debian because I read somewhere that it’s the lowest resource hog of all Linux server options.
Alternatively, should I stick to Debian and portainer but use it with something like podman as it might use less resources than docker-ce?
Is it your cpu or your ram that hits the roof? Is it the host OS/Portainer or the services you run on it?
Here’s how to check container usage in Portainer: https://docs.portainer.io/user/docker/containers/stats
The server kinda stops completely responding when it’s doing a heavy download… so I can’t get to those stats. But the other commenter has recommended I use https://github.com/henrygd/beszel so I’ll check it out and see what the data reveals. I believe, based on how the system freezes up, that it must be the CPU hitting the roof.
If it’s fanless, is it thermal throttling?
It’s fanless! How can I check for thermal throttling? Is that a bios setting?
Thermal throttling is when the system (usually the cpu) becomes so hot from the lack of cooling provided to it, that it limits its performance to save itself from certain death - going so far as performing a hard shutdown if the situation doesn’t improve or stabilize. AMD chips usually throttle at 80C, Intel chips 100C, but it could be a few different components. You need to run software that can properly read and report the temperature of various parts in your system to see if you might be hitting the throttling threshold.
I know software to do this for windows, but not any for *nix.
I installed a thing called lm-sensors on debian and it shows me this during a time when the box is struggling -
Every 1.0s: sensors
coretemp-isa-0000 Adapter: ISA adapter Package id 0: +44.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C) Core 0: +38.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C) Core 1: +39.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C) Core 2: +39.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C) Core 3: +39.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
acpitz-acpi-0 Adapter: ACPI interface temp1: +0.0°C (crit = +119.0°C)
Seems to be working fine.
Unless the thermal throttling limits are set by the BIOS and I’ll have to go looking into that by rebooting?
Resources also seemed ok - RAM was 2 GB used out of 16 and all the cores were at 10-15% usage, according to htop.
Yeah, that all looks okay. Did you put the system under heavy load while checking/monitoring?
I was just trying to open my transmission dashboard! 😄
Have the system do something intensive and see how much the temps climb. Let it work for a few minutes and see - that will tell you if your system is thermal throttling or not.
I hope you find out that it’s a not very necessary service that is the culprit, so that you can simply skip it. :)
I hope so too! I’m not running a lot on this box. Just a few containers and avahi.
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