System requirements

This page states in broad strokes what hardware a self hosted instance needs. It is written for anyone who is ordering a VM or assessing an existing machine.

Guide values

	Guide value
CPU	2 to 4 vCPU
Memory	4 to 16 GB, depending on the number of users
Disk	a few dozen GB, with headroom for uploaded files
Operating system	a common Linux distribution with long term support
CPU instruction set	AVX, required (see below)

Disk demand grows above all with the uploaded files; if a lot is stored, plan generously from the start. Small instances are explicitly allowed.

CPU load in normal operation is low, because the computation happens at the inference provider. Peaks only occur with individual additional features. What grows with the user count is above all the memory demand of the application; for a larger workforce a dedicated VM per instance pays off.

AVX: the one hard requirement

Every figure above is a guide value: a smaller machine runs more slowly, but it runs. One thing has no such gradation. The database in use requires the AVX CPU instruction set. Without it it does not start at all, and it does so without any message naming the cause.

Check it on the machine:

Is AVX present?

grep -o -m1 avx /proc/cpuinfo

If avx comes back, you are fine. If nothing comes back, on a virtual machine it is almost never the hardware. It is the CPU type the hypervisor passes through. Many hypervisors set new machines to a generic model that sits below AVX.

Virtual machines: check the CPU type

Set the machine’s CPU type to pass through the host CPU, or to a baseline that includes AVX. On Proxmox those two settings are called host and x86-64-v3; the defaults kvm64 and x86-64-v2-AES are not enough.

Then stop and start the machine. A reboot from inside is not enough: the CPU type is fixed when the virtualization process starts, and that process keeps running.

Every common server CPU since roughly 2011 supports AVX. If the hypervisor host itself reports no AVX, the hardware really is too old. Then only a different machine helps.

Operating system and container runtime

Recommended is a common Linux distribution with long term support. On other distributions the installation keeps working, but behavior may differ.

Mandatory is a current container runtime with Compose support. Obtain it from the vendor’s official package source; the packages of some distributions do not include the required scope.

Disk

The container images occupy a few gigabytes once. After that, three things grow above all: the uploaded files, the database and the logs.

Disk is the first limit in operation, not memory. Monitor the usage and clean up images that are no longer needed on a regular basis.

The setup documents

The requirements for network, access and operating system in detail are described in the documents that come with the delivery. They are part of the installation package.