Document server requirements

[geraldo]

Any hints on what minimal server requirements would be recommended for the setup? Probably Elasticsearch is the one demanding most, but what would be the numbers for RAM, disk space and CPUs for a decent setup?

[Frando]

Hi, yes we should document this!
I think you'd be fine with 8GB RAM and some 4 CPU cores for running the backend and elasticsearch for a smaller instance. I don't have any practical experience in scaling Elasticsearch, so I cannot give realistic numbers on requirements for big and/or highly frequented instances. We'd have to reach out to people with more experience - maybe @hng ? - or find out ourselves.

The worker should run on its own (virtual) machine to not slow down the production environment. It needs around ~2GB of RAM per CPU core. In our current experience one CPU core can process audio files sequentially with a realtime factor (towards the audio length) of 4 to 8.

Disk space shouldn't be much of an issue. Of course CouchDB and Elasticsearch like SSDs. Required disk space should grow linearily with the database size. On the demo site, we have around ~4000 posts with transcripts. Elasticsearch and CouchDB together take around 600MB.

The worker will need some disk space for the models and the downloaded and converted files during processing. ~20GB should be enough.

Once we start to store files for longer, we'll use a distributed file storage protocol, e.g. S3 with minio.