Amount of RAM needed for a 10GbE Server

getmyphoto · April 30, 2019

I'm currently running a 7-year old mobile server for event photography that has 4x 1Gb connections setup via Link Aggregation (8GB of RAM, which gets saturated fairly quickly when users hit it) and I'm planning on upgrading/replacing it. I remember seeing an LTT Video a long time ago (one of the many server room upgrade ones) where Linus talked about how RAM plays a big part in a bottleneck for 10GbE networking on a server and based on the amount of data you plan to transfer at any one point in time would need to be a specific minimum amount.

More is obviously good, but I'm wondering if 32GB is enough. Should I plan instead for 64GB if I plan to fully saturate the connection?

Electronics Wizardy · April 30, 2019

Whats the system specs? What do you mean by ram saturated? Ram should be basically fully used all the time, unused ram is wasted ram.

What are you using the nas for? mostly sequentical?

You don't really need a set amount of ram, but more is always better.

Disk speed is probably more important here, go all ssd if you can for the best speed.

getmyphoto · April 30, 2019

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Whats the system specs? What do you mean by ram saturated? Ram should be basically fully used all the time, unused ram is wasted ram.

What are you using the nas for? mostly sequentical?

You don't really need a set amount of ram, but more is always better.

Disk speed is probably more important here, go all ssd if you can for the best speed.

So current server is a 2012 Mac Mini, planning to replace it with a newer one just due to how my setup works (8U portable box, 14" depth and already have dual Mac Mini 1U server mount hardware). All computers/devices that currently interface with this box are also Apple-based.

What I mean by fully saturated is that currently if 4 computers are passing data over the network to the server at the same time, Disk I/O is only at about 70% usage, but the RAM is sitting at 100% utilization and each machine cannot reach past 80-90MB/s each. When one machine is passing data, I can hit 122MB/s out of the theoretical 125MB/s.

The 2018 Mini has R/W of around 1500MB/s. The processor would be a 6-Core i7-8700B. Planning on buying refurb model with base 8GB of RAM and upgrading post-purchase with RAM that doesn't cost an arm, leg and Lance Armstrong's left testicle.

The server has two purposes:

A web server that currently interacts with 10 devices at the same time, but could be going up to 30-40+ concurrent users with the planned changes in how we're going to be operating (clients on their own devices while at an event).
The main repository that the cameras connect to via ethernet (Canon 1DX's) which also resizes files using custom software which I've written. In a three day event it can be resizing and organizing 20-30K images.

Electronics Wizardy · April 30, 2019

6 minutes ago, getmyphoto said:

So current server is a 2012 Mac Mini, planning to replace it with a newer one just due to how my setup works (8U portable box, 14" depth and already have dual Mac Mini 1U server mount hardware). All computers/devices that currently interface with this box are also Apple-based.

What I mean by fully saturated is that currently if 4 computers are passing data over the network to the server at the same time, Disk I/O is only at about 70% usage, but the RAM is sitting at 100% utilization and each machine cannot reach past 80-90MB/s each. When one machine is passing data, I can hit 122MB/s out of the theoretical 125MB/s.

The 2018 Mini has R/W of around 1500MB/s. The processor would be a 6-Core i7-8700B. Planning on buying refurb model with base 8GB of RAM and upgrading post-purchase with RAM that doesn't cost an arm, leg and Lance Armstrong's left testicle.

The server has two purposes:

A web server that currently interacts with 10 devices at the same time, but could be going up to 30-40+ concurrent users with the planned changes in how we're going to be operating (clients on their own devices while at an event).

The main repository that the cameras connect to via ethernet (Canon 1DX's) which also resizes files using custom software which I've written. In a three day event it can be resizing and organizing 20-30K images.

Do you need a mac mini for the nas, Id just get something like a synology as a deticated nas box, then use the mac minis just for processing data, not as a nas.

The 8gb mac mini should work fine as a 10gbe nas, the ram shouldn't be needed for just nas uses, and if extra ram is needed, you can easily add more later. But you probably want more ram if you using it for those other tasks aswell.