this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Those who are hosting on bare metal: What is stopping you from using Containers or VM's? What are you self hosting? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by kiol@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand what keeps such admins from migrating to containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

All my services run on bare metal because its easy. And the backups work. It heavily simplifies the work and I don't have to worry about things like a virtual router, using more cpu just to keep the container...contained and running. Plus a VERY tiny system can run:

  1. Peertube
  2. GoToSocial + client
  3. RSS
  4. search engine
  5. A number of custom sites
  6. backups
  7. Matrix server/client
  8. and a whole lot more

Without a single docker container. Its using around 10-20% of the RAM and doing a dd once in a while keeps everything as is. Its been 4 years-ish and has been working great. I used to over-complicate everything with docker + docker compose but I would have to keep up with the underlining changes ALL THE TIME. It sucked, and its not something I care about on my weekends.

I use docker, kub, etc...etc... all at work. And its great when you have the resources + coworkers that keep things up to date. But I just want to relax when I get home. And its not the end of the world if any of them go down.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh so the other 80% of your RAM can sit there and do nothing? My RAM is always around 80% or so as its caching stuff like it's supposed to.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Hahaha that's funny. I hope your not serous.

[–] funkajunk@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Unused RAM is wasted RAM

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 10 months ago

Welp OP did ask how we set it up. And for a family instance its good enough. The ram was extra that came with the comp. I have other things to do than optimize my family home server. There's no latency at all already.

It spikes when peertube videos are uploaded and transcoded + matrix sometimes. Have a good night!

[–] kiol@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Do you use any tools for management, such as Ansible or similar?

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Couple of custom bash scripts for the backups. Ive used ansible at work. Its awesome, but my own stuff doesn't require any robustness.

[–] Miaou@jlai.lu 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Assuming you run Synapse, that uses more than 1.5GB RAM just idling, your system has at the very least 16GB of RAM... Hardly what I'd call "very tiny"

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

...ok so Im lying about my system for...some reason?

Synapse looks like its using 200M right now. It jumps to 1 GB when being heavily used, but I only use it for piefed and a couple of other local rooms. Honestly its not doing so much for us so we were thinking of getting rid of it. Its irritating to keep having to set up new devices and no one is really using it.

Peertube is much bigger running around 500MB just doing its thing.

Its a single family instance.

# ps -eo user,pid,ppid,cmd,pmem,rss --no-headers --sort=-rss | awk '{if ($2 ~ /^[0-9]+$/ && $6/1024 >= 1) {printf "PID: %s, PPID: %s, Memory consumed (RSS): %.2f MB, Command: ", $2, $3, $6/1024; for (i=4; i<=NF; i++) printf "%s ", $i; printf "\n"}}'  
PID: 2231, PPID: 1, Memory consumed (RSS): 576.67 MB, Command: peertube 3.6 590508 
PID: 2228, PPID: 1, Memory consumed (RSS): 378.87 MB, Command: /var/www/gotosocial/gotosoc 2.3 387964 
PID: 2394, PPID: 1, Memory consumed (RSS): 189.16 MB, Command: /var/www/synapse/venv/bin/p 1.1 193704 
PID: 678, PPID: 1, Memory consumed (RSS): 52.15 MB, Command: /var/www/synapse/livekit/li 0.3 53404 
PID: 1917, PPID: 645, Memory consumed (RSS): 45.59 MB, Command: /var/www/fastapi/venv/bin/p 0.2 46680
[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

what do you run for RSS?

also, I hope you are not doing backups by dding an in use filesystem

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Freshrss. Sips resources.

The dd when I want. I have a script I tested a while back. The machine won't be on yeah. Its just a small image with the software.