Near the end of September, I was looking into buying a server for running a fairly intensive API. At the time, I was running it on a Raspberry Pi, a pretty common starter “server”, wasn’t really cutting it, and I found the Dell PowerEdge R630 server on Amazon. Boasting 128 gigabytes of ram, two 3.5 gigahertz Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 CPUs with 28 threads each(compared to the 4 total on the Raspberry Pi), and coming with two 1.2 terabyte hard drives, I thought it would be a great host for the API along with some of my other projects (and some of my friends’ projects such as a social media site).
Over the course of about a month, I’ve been regularly checking the stats on how it’s performing, and ran a stress test a couple of days ago; I’ll be going over the data here.
The API
The API itself hasn’t been too intensive on the scale of the server. The R630’s CPUs are about 14x more powerful than the old Raspberry Pi’s (Source: Raspberry Pi, Intel), and it has 8x more RAM. The CPU usage rarely exceeds above 4% at peak hours, and the memory usage is usually ~3gb.
Other Services
I host a lot of free things for people. As a result, I know because server hosting is expensive, and for a beginner who just wants somewhere to host a small websocket server for their game or something, it can be a big barrier. I use PM2 to manage these, which unfortunately does not always accurately display CPU and memory usage, but it’s a pretty good process manager. Combined, they only use about 2% of the total cpu, which is pretty good!
Stress Test
I opened a Minecraft server with 64gb of RAM allocated (I didn’t expect it to reach anywhere near this, and it didn’t), and got a couple of my friends to try and crash it. After spawning 5,000 chickens, my computer crashed but the server kept going, peaking at about 7% and then finally crashing too.
Pitfalls
The GPU. This thing is from 1998 and can run a terminal… and that’s about it. If you’re planning to run anything that’s even minorly gpu intensive, you’ll probably need to buy one yourself.
Age. The R630 reached its end-of-life in 2019, and the latest “supported” version of Ubuntu server edition is the 2018 release, which can’t run the latest version of NodeJS (which is what a lot of my stuff is in), so I had to switch to a slightly newer 2020 version, which isn’t officially supported, although I haven’t had any issues yet.
Summary
For ~$500 this device is a steal for its capabilities. The cost of modern counterparts with the same specs for most of the hardware would exceed what it cost, and you can’t get most of the benefits of this thing from consumer hardware. If you’re planning on hosting a lot of medium intensity services and you find one of these or a similar model somewhere like savemyserver.com, I would highly recommend getting it.
Obligatory note because there was some misunderstanding on what the difference between a server and your standard home computer is among my friends – You should not get a server for standard gaming, work, or whatever. A server is designed to run a lot of things in parallel, which is not what PCs are designed for. Even if you’re looking for a server, in a lot of low intensity cases a Raspberry Pi would probably work fine. If you don’t know what any of that means, do not buy this.