What is the magic?

[JustinDrake]

(Justin here, working on OpenBazaar. Sorry for the dumb questions.) How can IPTB spin up 1000s of nodes on a single machine? What's the trick for scaling to such high numbers?

Of course all the networking happens locally. But then it seems each IPFS node runs in a separate process. Are the IPFS nodes "dumbed down" in any significant way?

[Kubuxu]

No magic, just dev machines with quite a lot of RAM.

[JustinDrake]

Thanks. What's the order of magnitude RAM footprint per IPFS node? 1MB, 10MB? Is CPU much of a consideration, or is RAM the main bottleneck?

[Kubuxu]

It is about 100MiB per node right now, but we are working on reducing it further, it was less in the past. Idle CPU is very low.

[whyrusleeping]

@JustinDrake Yeah, most iptb clusters i run see around 40MB of ram usage per node. I have a fairly beefy dev machine i use to spin up clusters, although i think the largest i've messed around with is 512. Cpu becomes an issue when youre doing large multi-peer transfers, as well as disk