Hardware Requirements
Forest is designed to be lightweight enough to run on consumer hardware. Below are recommendations for the minium and recommended hardware requirements for running a Forest node, depending on the use case. All requirements assume running the latest version of Forest on mainnet. The requirements on test networks are significantly lower (yes, solar-powered Raspberry Pi 5 is totally fine, check the bottom of the page).
As a rule of thumb, an RPC node would require 200 GiB + 5 GiB per day of retention of disk space. For example, if you want to retain 60 days of historical state, you would need 200 GiB + (5 GiB * 60) = 500 GiB of disk space.
Also, if you disable GC, you can cut the disk space requirements in half, but you will need to manage the disk space manually (it's growing by ~2 GiB per day).
RPC Node (low traffic, minimal retention)
Memory and CPU depend highly on the expected load and enabled RPC methods. Disk space depends on the required historical state to retain.
| Minimum | Recommended | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | 4-core | 6-core | |
| Memory | 8 GiB | 16 GiB | Network upgrades can require more memory. |
| Disk Space | 256 GiB | 256 GiB | SSD (high IOPS/NVMe recommended) |
RPC Node (2 months retention)
This setup should be sufficient for a self-hosted RPC node that retains 2 months of historical state.
Low-traffic is considered under 100 requests per minute. Ultimately, the CPU and memory requirements depend on the combination of request types and their frequency.
| Low traffic | High traffic | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | 6-core | 8-core | |
| Memory | 16 GiB | 32 GiB | Network upgrades can require more memory. |
| Disk Space | 500 GiB | 500 GiB | SSD (high IOPS/NVMe recommended) |
Bootstrap Node (stateless)
| Minimum | Recommended | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | 2-core | 4-core | |
| Memory | 2 GiB | 4 GiB | Stateless nodes don't need migrations so no spikes |
| Disk Space | 3 GiB | 3 GiB | State is not stored, snapshots are not required |
To properly serve the network, a bootstrap node should ensure at least 6 Mbps upload and 2 Mbps download bandwidth.
Community: Portable Solar-Powered Forest Node
More of a curiosity - direct Twitter link - but it's worth noting that Forest can run on a limited hardware setup. Probably not with an SD card.