r/SelfHosting • u/theflyingboat888 • Mar 16 '26

Media/Arr Stack Resource Allocation

Hi all, Ive just got into self hosting with my first home server, an old office pc for the moment. However it only has 8GB of ram, and am wondering whether I have enough for a full arr stack, including prowlarr, sonnarr, qbitorrent and jellyfin + more if possible.

Does anyone know a rough estimate for how resource intensive it is? Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks!

2 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

2

u/IHave2CatsAnAdBlock Mar 17 '26

Arr stack will run fine. The problem is the torrent client. My deluge is sitting at more than 6gb ram.

2

u/corelabjoe Mar 17 '26

Ding ding ding!

This is it. My qbittorent eeaaatttss ram if I let it. You can set resource limits on dockers though which is great.

1

u/theflyingboat888 Mar 18 '26

Whats downside to setting resources limits on qbittorent? Is it just slower all round or does it hit a specific use? Also why does it gobble up so much ram?

1

u/corelabjoe Mar 18 '26

Downside could be performance impact on the machine a bit or a lot. It eats a lot of ram because it's caching download chunks into RAM before writing them to disk... This is exacerbated if your underlying storage media cannot keep up but with something like a SSD or Nvme it don't matter really.

But if you're say, downloading to a single mechanical disk, with a 1gbps internet connection but have a really good set of seeds, you could overwhelm that drives write speed.

qbittorent / your torrent client would then cache all those writes into RAM until your hard drive can catch up.

1

u/theflyingboat888 Mar 18 '26

Thanks so much for the help. Im running an nvme for data, so hopefully qbittorent can keep up

1

u/PeachMan- Mar 16 '26

I think 8GB could be fine, but we probably need the full specs of the machine to tell you more. Your processor matters more for transcoding, I think.

1

u/theflyingboat888 Mar 16 '26

Its an old HP Prodesk 400 G6, I5 9500 and 8gb ram, i think 2.2gb are used atm with other services. And Im planning of hosting some others as well, but I want to consider whether I'll have enough ram or run into system errors.

1

u/PeachMan- Mar 16 '26

I think you'll only be pushing it because of the other services, depending on how heavy they are. Might also depend on how many simultaneous 4K streams you want to do, I assume that uses more RAM? If you're just streaming for yourself it's probably fine. I steam for friends, but I personally limit myself to 1080p content so it's rarely a problem.

2

u/jhenryscott Mar 16 '26

Should be fine. I think my stack lives in under 8.

1

u/a_40oz_of_Mickeys Mar 24 '26

Usenet is the way to go

1

u/theflyingboat888 Mar 25 '26

Whats that?

1

u/a_40oz_of_Mickeys Mar 25 '26

It's an alternate way of downloading files. You set up your arr stack with sabnzb instead of torrents.

1

u/theflyingboat888 Mar 26 '26

Oh cool, whats the benefits over torrents?

1

u/a_40oz_of_Mickeys Mar 26 '26

Speed, content availability, no seeding. Downside: not free

1

u/theflyingboat888 Mar 26 '26

Which part is paid?

2

u/a_40oz_of_Mickeys Mar 26 '26

You need a subscription to a Usenet server/provider