Moving from AWS to on Prem: RAM, Re-pasting, the works?
reddit / selfhosted

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lumpy-Ad2724 · 2023-12-22 11:50

Hello,

When moving to on prem, I had a discussion recently about how little
space and fairly easy to judge on quality older i5-i7 laptops can be -
just whack in linux, check the battery health, see if RAM is viable
and double check it is upgradeable, and if it can run on charge
playing a game for 24 hours, it'll probably be reliable.

The thing is, AWS processors are beefy, like, really beefy. I tried
moving some load (low networking, mostly on device) on to a 2016
laptop i5 and it went about as slowly as a glacier breaking free...in
winter. AWS at the same RAM/vCPUs (8/2) was much much faster than
these laptops. The sys bench results (CPU) for these laptops are
approx:  700-1000 events per second

So I have realized older laptops might only be viable for web
hosting/light stuff, and that's why they are pretty cheap.

But that lead me to thinking: Could these issues be due to the CPU
temperature or battery? If I spend a couple of days and buy a bunch of
replacement batteries, am I likely to see this improve much? Some
batteries are like 10-20 WH / 56 or so WH base. I always hear about
repasting but thought it is mostly for gaming laptops.

Would it be a better idea to buy new for on prem and one or two proper
servers rather than use laptops as?

Or is there a better way for me to calculate the sysbench results of
our AWS instances to find similarly powerful consumer machines? Can
sysbench on AWS give good results? Really I want the geekbench results
for comparability but can't get them for all these devices :(

We are very lucky to have a business that mostly isn't urgently used
and caches information(think quarterly automated reports), so downtime
isn't too vital, as we have a queuing system for workloads. Would love
advice from anybody who has done this.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
katrinatransfem · 2023-12-22 21:34

Desktops are probably a better bet than laptops if you want to go down
that route.

Depends on the number of users etc obviously, but an i7 3770 from 2012
is very usable.