r/homelab • u/YourMomsYourDad3 • 8h ago
Help Is 16GB RAM a necessity
I'm on an early journey into home labbing and looking for a computer to get started. I have 0 experience in this, I don't even own a personal computer.
The goal at the moment is just Jellyfin and a music streaming service but It may very likely go further with some self hosting (photos, documents) raspberry pie hole etc or it may be a disaster and I'm just not that technically minded, lets see.
Is 16GB a necessity or will I get away with 8GB and if so, for how long? I have a 1TB SSD that will hold my media for jellyfin.
Ps, I'm looking at the usual mini pcs (optiplex, elitedesk, gmktec etc)
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u/Wis-en-heim-er 7h ago
You can run lots on linux with less ram. This said, as your needs change you may outgrow 8gb of ram. You will certainly outgrow 1tb of storage if you start collecting movies. For now, start with whatever you can and dont be afraid to add hardware or sell off whats not meeting your needs.
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u/deltatux Xeon W-11955M | Arc A750 | 64GB DDR4 | Debian 13 8h ago
Really depends on what you're running. Even my network box which includes OPNSense and several network services takes up more than 8GB of RAM. My primary server uses at least 16GB and goes to 24+GB on a regular basis. It also uses the RAM for ZFS caching.
So it really depends on what your use cases are. If all you're doing is lightweight tasks, sure maybe 8GB is enough but for my use cases, 16GB is minimum.
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u/QuantumCakeIsALie 6h ago
It depends on what you're running, but also your responsiveness expectations.
My main NAS with a bunch of services uses a fair amount of swap. But the performance requirements are so low for my personal use that I honestly couldn't tell before I checked just now.
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u/msanangelo 8h ago
not really but I just go for as much as I can reasonably afford for what it can support. better to have too much than not enough. whatever is left over goes to disk cache.
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u/Adrenolin01 8h ago
Ram is literally going to be your first bottleneck in pretty much any build. The lowest Ram setups I run have 16GB.. my dedicated pfSense firewalls and my N100 BeeLink S12 Pro mini PCs… one specifically setup with Debian, Plex and JellyFin with 16GB ram. A few of those I’ve expanded to 32GB. My seed box runs 32GB ram. My NAS systems run 64GB & 128GB ram. My 2 Minisforums NAB9 i9 based mini PCs with Proxmox both are maxed at 64GB ram. My larger Proxmox virtualization servers run 128, 256 and 384GB ram. As the saying goes…. You Can Never Have Too Much Ram! 😆
HomeLAB.. I’d honestly look for an older 4-8 core system that you can install 16-32GB ram into. If you want a newer system I’ve purchased over 2 dozen of the N100 BeeLink S12 mini PCs with 16GB ram. Install Proxmox (Debian based) and your new virtualization system will allow for a LOT of test / learning experience. All the hardware is full supported also. Undocumented… they support 32GB ram.
Btw… you’ll eventually want a second system… a Production system you run your daily learned services on. This is a stable system that you want up and running 24/7 for your services you start to depend on. Keep your homelab just that… a LAB.
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u/McSmiggins 8h ago
8GB will work fine, BUT, make sure you've got a system that can take the upgrade to 16 without a lot of fuss (e.g has an empty ram slot)
I'm assuming you're not planning on running Windows underneath Jellyfin here
You don't want to have to throw away 2 x 4GB sticks and have to buy 2 x 8GB
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u/computer_dork 8h ago
Its doable, but particularly when learning you are going to need to spend time optimizing and making decisions about what's important enough for your limited amount of ram. These are great things to learn, but they are a pain in the ass
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u/digitaldingo75 8h ago
For the streaming part 8gb will be in spec. For your media storage 1TB will fill up quickly. Generally speaking you should check the hardware requirements for each service you want to run and word back from that.
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u/p_235615 8h ago
you can run quite a lot of services on 8GB, jellyfin sits around 0.6GB but can bloat up a bit some times during use, immich stack around 1.2GB. I right now running 82 containers and all that is using around 18GB, so you can run quite a lots of them even at 8GB.
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u/ApprehensiveFan1516 3h ago
My NAS runs on 8GB, also hosting Jellyfin, Immich, Navidrome, Kavita. There's no RAM left to spare, but it works just fine.
You can see here where I started streaming a movie. This is also transcoding from 265 to 264.
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u/ByteOfWood 8h ago
You can get away with 8gb. Not sure about jellyfin, you may run into some poor performance there, but it should probably still run. Tbh for this I'd recommend you start with just a basic smb/samba file server because that will run very easily on 8gb of ram.
I have pihole running on an old 8gb mini PC and it barely uses any system resources so I'd expect no issues for you.
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u/HeftyCelebration7975 8h ago
It depends on what you’re running really. I’m using Plex, a pi hole and the Rs. I’ve got 16Gb but I never even get close to using that much. But if you were to start using virtual machines then 16GB will be used up very quickly
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u/VisitOk621 8h ago
As others mentioned it very heavily depends on what you do. For jellyfin and music stream the ram is probably not your bottleneck. Jellyfin buffered segments on your ssd/hdd, therefore the ram footprint per stream is small. What would concern me most is: what do you want to stream where. Because jellyfin cannot nescessarily stream native quality to all devices depending on the codec. CPU transcoding is very demanding and slow. A GPU does that significantly better. If you stream 720p h.264 with 3mps bitrate then it is less an issue.
Ram is holding software in the cache. Linux likes to claim ram usage is high, while in fact it is only reserved but idle. It is somewhat misleading.
It is significantly more demanding for ram if you have something combined with e.g. redis or similar database, which is primarly living in ram.
And for SSD: You profit from faster read access, but writing takes the same amount of time as on hdd. Since jellyfin buffers on the drive the segments it does not make a difference. Not that this would likely be an issue ever. Just saying.
Tl;dr 8GB is sufficient for lightweight OS + Jellyfin/Navidome or something via docker.
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u/309_Electronics 7h ago
Depends on your usage amount and what you are hosting. I survived on 8gb just fine on my nas but upped it to 16gb when i got another stick just so i could run immich and jellyfin alongside each other.
On my proxmox node that runs my services (blog website, links page, blog apis (likes, comments, analytics), nginx proxy manager, tailscale vpn, vaultwarden) i run 8gb of rm just fine but thats because i am rhe only user of my homelab.
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u/coldafsteel 7h ago
Ehhh having room for a big RAM for caching can be important for Medea streaming.
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u/Diavolo_Rosso_ 6h ago
My main optiplex has 32Gb and I was really pushing it. Actually spun up proxmox on a second, slightly older optiplex with 16Gb to relieve some of the pressure.
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u/2026_health_333 6h ago
8GB is more than enough to start hosting Jellyfin, a music app, and Pi-hole. Linux with these basic Docker containers barely uses 2GB to 3GB of RAM. You will only max out 8GB if you run heavy photo apps like Immich or Proxmox virtual machines. A used corporate mini PC (Dell OptiPlex Micro, HP EliteDesk) is your best bet. Make sure to pick an 8th Gen Intel CPU or newer for hardware video transcoding. These machines are vastly superior to a Raspberry Pi and easily upgradable. Buy an 8GB model cheap now and test if you actually enjoy home labbing. You can always pop in another 8GB RAM stick later for around twenty bucks.
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u/No_Talent_8003 6h ago
If you already had this machine, I would say dont let the analysis hold you back from trying it out.
Since you say you are shopping, i'd change that up to say dont let being financially limited to smaller hardware gatekeep you from trying out something new.
However, I would absolutely look at previous Gen used hw where I might get a deal and be able to bump the ram capacity up. Homelab server applications really dont need to be on ddr5, and definitely not in today's market. Dont shy away from a laptop, but used office desktops are still probably the best deals and with the best flexibility as your lab progresses.
Probably the only thing I wouldn't do is buy something with 8gb that is soldered memory.
Also, understand this: windows is a damn resource hog. When working on a tight budget, the onus is going to be on you to learn Linux and use it when possible. Win11 has its place but its really challenging to work into such light specs
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u/120mmbarrage 6h ago
If you're doing light tasks, you can get away with 8 gigs. Some people get away with doing their stuff on Raspberry Pis, so 8 is fine. I personally downgraded my home server that had 32 gigs of RAM to a smaller pc that only has 8 gigs soldered on. I had a lot of services on the other pc that I barely used and did consume a chunk of that RAM to now just the essentials I use day to day. I run my Samba shares off of here, Adguard Home, my qBittorrent + Gluetun setup, Memos server, Jellyfin, Joplin server, Navidrome, and Tailscale. RAM usage is around 2-3 gigs. The bad thing is it does suck as a NAS, since it only has 2 m.2 slots inside, no 2.5 inch bay, so all of my data is on external hard drives that I have hooked up to this thing. It at least has USB 3.2 ports on it so the data transfer isn't too bad.
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u/SnooDoggos4906 5h ago
it all depends on how much you run and what. I ryn an xcp hyp with home assistant vm, linux vm, xen orchestra vmon 16 gb. It runs fine. Depends what you are doing. File servers dont really require a lot of RAM. 8Gb will probably work as starting place. upgrade as u go.
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u/chkthetechnique 5h ago
I have 16GB and even that is hard on my setup with media streaming, AdGuard, OpenMediaVault, and Immich. Depends on what you want to do... 8GB is enough to host Plex or Jellyfin, but barely and not much else.
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u/JohnnyBeeGaming 4h ago
You could probably start with with a low amount of ram if you aren't really doing much or wouldn't have too many services being used at the same time. If you already have the ram in hand or that is just what the system has then just see how it goes.
If you are buying RAM one thing to think about is how many slots you have and how you might not want to mix sizes and speeds. If you only have 2 slots and you get an 8gig stick you might not be able to use that 8gig if you decide you want 32gigs later.
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u/AlbatrossTight7692 4h ago
I’m running 32GB on an Unraid server with 6 VMs and 5 Dockers. I’m constantly running around 76% ram usage. The more RAM the better in my opinion.
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u/livestrong2109 4h ago
There's some small services that would be fine with 8gb even a plex sever without any transcoding.
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u/mr_rankity_rank 4h ago
I have a 16gb Pi running, Home Assistant, Mosquito, zigbee2mqtt, Pi-hole, a Postgres server, Restic backups, NUT server, Airflow, Uptime Kuma, Caddy, several custom services and I'm barely hitting 6gb. It depends on your operating system but with Linux, you'd be more than fine.
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u/RedSquirrelFtw 2h ago
It's on the low side but now days if you don't already have it on hand then you'll have to make due with what you can afford given the insane prices.
I would try to find some SFF PCs on Ebay as sometimes they actually do come with 16GB of ram and are cheaper than buying the ram separately. Rather than have one host trying to do everything you could build several Proxmox nodes then spread services around.
For basic Linux systems that are not really doing anything ram intensive I find I can often get away with 512MB of ram. Things like Jellyfin or Frigate tend to be a little more ram hungry though.
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u/MontagneHomme 2h ago
Truly depends on what you're doing.
8GB is perfectly sufficient for something simple like a router or node with a couple of simple services.
16GB is ok, but not great for a media service provider - like a jellyfin instance - either with a separate NAS or running on a NAS with an old-school hardware RAID setup. Not ok for one with a modern software RAID.
As a point of reference, a modern software RAID (ZRAID-1) needs about 16GB of RAM unto itself - and will happily expand to 50% of whatever system RAM is available; 16GB or 16TB. This is the trick that makes it so darn performant. There are companies/people selling/building NAS' today with worse performance than a NAS from 5+ years ago simply because they're not taking advantage of RAM caching at the file system level.
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u/Addys0nn8 8h ago
Probably can get away with 8gbs of ram very temporarily. As soon as you get a few services going, 16gbs will not only become necessary, but probably nearing insufficient itself too.
32gbs of ram is pretty standard for basic home server. No shame in going ddr3 generation if you need to based on budget