Hardware/OS Requirements/Recommendations for running a Full Validator Node

Question

What would be the recommended hardware specs for a dedicated Full Validator Node server?

I read here (How big is the ledger?) that I can currently expect ~60GB disk space used by the core and horizon databases. So a few terrabytes should be plenty for the next couple of years or so?

Also, on an OS side. I found this tutorial for CentOS (https://galactictalk.org/d/20-setting-up-stellar-core-on-centos-7). It's from 2016 though and I was wondering if there are any pre-compiled versions of stellar-core for CentOS by now?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The docs specify the hardware requirements, quoting (as off 5/7/2018):

Stellar-Core

Instances of Stellar-Core are part of the network as a node and therefore need to be large enough to support the volume on the network.

Minimum

CPU: 4-Core (8-Thread) Intel i7/Xeon or equivalent (c5.xlarge on AWS)

RAM: 8GB DDR4

SSD: 64GB

Recommended

CPU: 8-Core (16-Thread) Intel i7/Xeon or equivalent (c5.2xlarge on AWS)

RAM: 16GB DDR4

SSD: 120GB

Horizon

Instances of Horizon ingest data from the network and therefore need to be large enough to support ingesting all of the latest transactions on the network.

There is a significant amount of computation that is done on the DB side of Horizon, these requirements are only for the application side of horizon. If you are going by these requirements then you will need to account for using a larger machine if using the same machine for the DB, or a separate machine for the DB altogether.

Minimum

CPU: 8-Core (16-Thread) Intel i7/Xeon or equivalent (c5.2xlarge on AWS)

RAM: 16GB DDR4

SSD: 64GB

Recommended

CPU: 16-Core (32-Thread) Intel i7/Xeon or equivalent (c5.4xlarge on AWS)

RAM: 32GB DDR4

SSD: 120GB

---

Stellar-Core and horizon are available as debian packages, you can check them out here.

You can install stellar-core and horizon using the following commands:

# update sources to include for stellar-core and horizon

echo "deb https://apt.stellar.org/public stable/" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/SDF.list

# install

apt-get update apt-get install stellar-core apt-get install stellar-horizon

Answer 2

There is no clear cut specifications.

Note that stellar core requires 64bit OS. If your small machine can afford running 64 bit, it should be more than powerful enough and there is no problem.

Update 2018 Nov:

Over 250GB storage used, for full-sync public network which has been up for several years.

Note that the projected usage is likely to increase, as the popularity of the network goes up, and also the version of software changes.

For storage, a few TB is definitely enough. You could see that the cumulative storage for several years is still under 50GB. Unless the transaction rate grows really wild (rising exponentially...), it will take maybe 30 years to consume 1TB.

There should be no precompiled stellar core. Docker is however available, but there might be some problem with the docker as the versions are often not up to date.

Several months ago, I also asked on Slack about the bandwidth requirement for running stellar core. A few MB/s should be enough, as the size of the flowing data is designed minimal.

Enjoy!