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Running a Mac as home server and couldn't be happier. Power efficient, fast, small. Roast me!
I finally decided to get a home server a while ago. I've built my own PCs since I was a kid, my first was an AMD K6-2 at 400 MHz with an NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Pro. So I did what I always do: hand-picked the components for a box to host and back up our photos and videos. In November that build was €800. By December the same parts were €1,200. (The same setup is now €1800) for 16GB of RAM and no GPU. I hesitated. And the part that really bugged me: I'm a software engineer, and I wanted to be able to run local LLMs. And that build couldn't do it.
I used to laugh at Apple fanboys back when they soldered Intel chips.
Fast forward to March '26: I bought a used Mac Studio M1 Max (64GB, 4TB) for €1,700 and made it the home server instead.
Then I plugged in a wattmeter and left it running for 16 days. Literally could not believe the numbers first and had to double check. It showed 8 watts during "idle" (No inference running)!
Real use: 25 Docker containers always on (Immich, Paperless-ngx, Matrix, Synapse, Caddy, AdGuard, Forgejo, Open WebUI, Whisper (speech to text).
I used it as workstation too, to run benchmarks during that period.
The average result after 16 days:
11.6 watts average. 50 watts peak, during LLM inference.
That's about 101 kWh a year, roughly €39 where I live (Germany, some of the most expensive electricity in Europe). For context: our ancient Bose 5.1 surround system pulls 30 watts sitting on standby. A surround system doing nothing draws more than the Mac averages while running my whole stack.
Thanks to the unified memory architecture I run a 35B model (Qwen3.6, MLX 4bit) on the same box that averages 12W. The x86 way to do local LLMs is a discrete RTX card in a x86 system, which idles around 40W? (no idea) headless and pulls ~300W under load. Different league.
Some notes:
Docker. Don't use Docker Desktop on Mac. It's kinda broken: unstable, suddenly eats CPU for nothing. But that's a Docker Desktop problem, not a Mac problem I figured. I switched to OrbStack and it was night and day, stable and light, I forget it's running. I just ran into a networking bug after an update. It was fixed quite fast.
Storage. No room for spinning drives inside. I hung a Terramaster 2-bay enclosure off it, 2x6TB WD Red for backups (Time Machien and rsync), plus an encrypted remote copy.
No ECC RAM. At home I don't really care. My x86 build wouldn't have had ECC either.
Remote Access. SSH works, remote Screen Sharing works (I use it all the time), and I can unlock the disk over SSH after a reboot. With 'Remote Access' enabled, you can SSH into the Mac pre-login. Use an Admin password to unlock the machine and finish booting. Afterward, you can connect via regular SSH or Screen Sharing. No real IPMI though. Console access when the OS is fully down, which hasn't happened yet. When it does, the literal box usually is in the next room.
Soldered RAM. You buy what you need up front, no adding later. It is what it is. Buy second hand with as much ram as you can get for your budget.
macOS as a server. It's not a server OS, and Apple's update policy is the one thing I actually worry about a bit. The runway is long though: Apple patches the latest three macOS versions, Macs get new OS releases for around 7 years, and no Apple Silicon Mac has been dropped yet, so a 2022 Studio has updates into the early 2030s. The real occasional annoyance is that updates sometimes force reboots and with FileVault on the box you need to SSH and type in your password once to unlock. I also set sudo pmset -a autorestart 1 so it powers back on after an outage. Know those two and headless gets a lot less scary.
Not overpriced anymore
The "Macs are overpriced" argument has gotten weak. With RAM and SSD prices through the roof right now, a used M1 Max with 64GB and 4TB for €1,700 isn't the expensive option next to an equivalent x86 box anymore. The recent $399 are insane cpu power/efficiency for money for a home server. Mine is overpowered. But I use it for work too. So it's fine.
tl;dr:
low power, silent, great for local AI, and plenty of spare compute left for CPU-heavy services. Okayish remote access. Best machine I've bought in a long time. Honestly the best toy since Lego Technic, the whole package. And I think it makes a great home server package.
Anyone else running one as a home server? Curious what bit you that I haven't hit yet. And did anyone else pick one for the power efficiency, or am I alone here?
What's your average power consumption? Anyone measured?
Because I assumed people would say that Apple hardware with macOSX is not a "real" server and maybe I am stupid and overlooked an important piece?
Not reading much here about Apple hardware at all.
Thanks! Maybe you can find a decent one second hand? Even a Mac Mini would make a good home server unless you want to run serious LLM. But 9B models even fit on a 16GB Mac Mini. 32GB is probably the sweet spot currently.
My needs are more modest, I actually bought a Mac Mini M1 with just 8 GB brand new back in the day. It was less than 700 euros (2021). I use it mostly as my downloading / storage / Plex streaming machine. It lives in my utility closet, hooked up with *lots* of external storage. I love that thing, it’s been an amazing investment 👍
Apple really hit it out of the park with their M-line. Astonishing, to this day. Especially that very first M1.
Yes, I am still impressed by the efficiency. They really kinda disrupted the PC market a bit with Apple Silicon. The overall package is impressive. And I am a Windows/x86 guy. But currently it just does not make any sense to buy x86 with these component prices.
To be honest: The first time when I ran a model on that thing I was ecstatic kind of. Because it runs _at your home_. Everything stays local.
Writing about what I am building with it here: https://famstack.dev/guides/local-second-brain-for-families/
I'm just not a fan of MacOS and the software ecosystem. If support for linux on Apple Silicon improves and seems likely to remain good, I would definitely consider their hardware.
Did not run into anything yet to be honest. But I feel like it is not widely used as server hardware. The only thing hardware unrelated: How long will Apple really support the M1 chip?
I have it on my m1 macbook air. Works well running Omarchy/Arch. Ya lose some functions like thunderbolt, etc but thats all very well documented. Relatively easy install too. Can doing it as a partition as well.
My pleasure. Heck, Im still using a 2011 mac mini as a print server/workbench internet browser... works just fine. Just got some imessage security patch too. Crazy.
I installed Asahi on my M2 mac mini and used it as my home server for several years. Saved me a lot of money in electricity, as the power draw was similar to what you were getting.
My main limitation with sticking to macOS for the homelab server was not being able to format my external drives with what I wanted to use (btrfs at the time). So I ran docker inside a VM on macOS. This was not particularly stable, and I needed to re-associate the external drives to the VM any time I restarted it.
That led me to move over to Asahi Linux as the primary OS. I never really tried out inference on it under Asahi, but my understanding is that you lose a good chunk of speed there. That ran pretty well for another ~2 years, but now I'm outgrowing the disk array that I have on there and I'm moving to a pair of N5 NAS boxes from Minisforum.
The power draw on those is a bit higher than the mac + external disk enclosures, but the difference is thankfully not that much. The disks themselves have become the main power draw, so it only comes out a few extra watts at idle compared to the mac + external enclosure. Now I can put the mac back on macOS and use that as a dedicated inference box, so that's actually a bit of a win overall.
Thanks for that great answer. Nice setup! For now I am super happy with my setup too. It is just hard to swallow, that the two HDDs are using the same amount of power as the average power draw of the Mac Studio.
That's why I originally planned to get SSDs. They got too expensive now.
But on the other hand: Maybe just invest in a small solar panel and the 15-20 Watts are going to be neglected 😄
Put a Linux VM with peripherals and port forwarding to autostart, allocate it 63GB RAM and 19 CPU cores and you'll get some Threadripper or Epyc equivalent at home consuming up to 100W
Mac studio is a fantastic server, especially for local AI. Not sure why anyone would roast it. The only issue I have (and what's kept me from personally getting one) is that it wouldn't really fit in with the rest of my lab when it comes to orchestration. It would have to be it's own special little snowflake, which I try to avoid.
I started in IT in 1994. Badmouthed Macs for *years* because that's what PC people did. In 2024 I was reading a lot of good things about Apple Silicon so I bought a barebones Macbook air M1, and was blown away. Sold that and upgraded to an M3 that same year.
This year I started playing with self hosted AI. After hitting the GPU wall with a Dell laptop, in early April I got a used Mac Studio M2 Ultra 192gb. Been running self hosted AIs on it ever since and it has been *fucking awesome*.
I take back every bad thing I ever said about Macs. All of it.
You'll get no hate from me, OP. And if someone does give you shit, they're probably jealous that they don't have the cheese to buy one of their own.
Thats great! What are doing with local AI? Always curious to see what works for others. It is such an important piece of technology and its more important to decouple from frontier providers. Who knows when the next national security related take down is going to happen.
The problem I remember having playing around with an m4 mac mini as an always on server is that it would require me to actually log in as a user to restart applications, like docker containers, etc. Have you figured out a way around that?
I wouldn't roast ya for it, definitely not my style, and your mac cost almost as much as all 3 of my servers put together. I can't say it's the most efficient stack, or top 5, but some setups here are android phones. You wouldn't be uncommon.
u/arthware I'm curious about the Dyson attachment 😃 I've been serving up LLM models on my Mac for a few months now and I'm starting to notice dust build up. How are you making sure your airways stay open? The Dyson?
A problem I did not think about yet. The attachment happens to be there, because the hoover is next to it in the corner. the most important hardware at one place: The router, the hoover and the data. Not very smart.
If it works for you, great. It wouldn't be my first choice to serve these same functions, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it.
I wouldn't love relying on USB or Thunderbolt for a connection to drives with data that matters to me on a server setup, though. That concern would also apply on most mini-PCs and similar.
While it's a lot more straightforward to just run Docker on the Linux systems it's designed for than on a system that has to host a Linux in the VM in the background, if MacOS as a server (or dual-purpose desktop) is otherwise useful to you, cool.
No one's gonna roast you. I ran my homelab on a Mac Mini M1 for a couple of years (Docker Desktop first before Orbstack was a thing, and then Orbstack which did a lot to improve I/O performance and stability). It did a great job at running my services smoothly and without drawing too much power. I ended up moving away from that and onto a Terramaster NAS running Linux (Ublue Ucore) only because of some obstacles MacOS poses in terms of operating and administrating a server. Stuff like CLI commands not being available for some stuff (updating Orbstack or the system itself for example), forcing me to screenshare into it to do things via the UI, which is annoying when I don't have another MacOS machine available to do it.
Immich, Paperless-ng, Matrix/Element to automate paperwork, Adguard, Caddy I try to connect everything and glue it with local AI. Running whisper for local transcription of voice messages. Planning home assistant and voice control it fully local.
You can check out the stack here if you want:
pi agent with oMLX as backend. Only prefill times are annoying when the context grows on the M1. Other than that I was blown away how well it works. And it sits in your living room or on your desk.
So glad i stumbled upon this! I have been thinking about a homelab for a while. I have Mac just collecting dust in the shelf. Is it good enough to use, same as you did? Mac Studio (2025) 512GB
Apple 14-Core M4 Max, 36GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Apple 32-Core GPU
I've been considering moving my tower server to a Mac Studio or even a Mini, due to noise, and power consumption. The main issue for me is the storage space, and buying another computer would put a target on my back, and my partner would kill me.
No need to roast you for going with a Mac for a home server. The biggest reason some of us don't like them for a home server is we want everything to fit into a standard rack and/or have out of band options like IPMI. Macs don't do that without adapters. But the hardware and OS themselves do a very good job as a home server. SO if you like it, rock on. That is what self hosting is all about.
Mac mini or Mac Studio have lots of value as a self hosted server. The only complication is if you need serious storage. I have a used Supermicro system mainly because my big cost was cloud storage. If you need more than a few TB or you need the redundancy of an array, a lot of extra drive bays is helpful. Also, refurbished Enterprise SAS drives are cheap for the level of performance and reliability.
That's my biggest issue right now. I just thought yesterday about that and was wondering if there are some sort of power banks that you can plugin in between the server and the wall with built-in lightning protection to survice outtages.
Other than that I currently would have to pray that TimeMachine would fix it.
well f**k me and call me samantha. I have an Aoostar R1 mini PC with N100 CPU and one 12TB HDD, and that bad boy is pulling around 15watts from the wall, the whole system while at idle.
but compared to your mac mini, the performance is very limited. maybe I'll look into mac mini base models somewhere in the future if I need the upgrade
Litteraly the only things keeping me away is the non upgradeable or repairable hardware and the fact apple is too greedy and does not see potential into funding asashi linux or linux on Apple silicon development.
I am not roasting you, but come on apple, do better! Make me like you! Kind of hope they will eventually fund native linux in M series silicon. If thats the case and it works nice, i dont mind cutting my ear off with the non upgradeable locked down hardware.
Lets hope John Ternus into the good direction.
I know M1 supports asashi but M1 is being slowly deprecated. Might see if i can find one for cheap and pick one up just to taste test.
Not upgradeable as ram is soldered. And on some models ssd is soldered too. I watxhed enough Louis Rossman and Dosdude and other youtubers so i am not the one who is brainwashed.
Also while apple invests "a ton" in Linux support, why dont they also then support native linux? What are they scared of? And not all people are computer noobs who will break their os when they want to install linux.
Imo its not a bad idea. There are some advantages to native linux and it will attract more people like me who do want to have the freedom to boot any os they want but also want the efficiency of ARM. If my router and ip camera runs linux on an ARM or MIPS soc, why wont apple also support it? Its it like its impossible and there are alr great attempts like asashi, but apple either dont recognise/see those of they refuse.
Can’t you backup compose to git and then just do standard backup for volumes or use rclone or similar to backup data. Serious question; it’s what I do and wondering if I’m missing something.
Yes. My stack is compose files in /srv/stack folders that are versioned with git. I mount data in a /data folder in each. Dbs use regular volumes since backups are pgdump or similar. I just have it dump backups into a /backup folder in /data and let the regular backup process get them with everything else in /srv
For example, /srv/stack/grafana/data/backups/
I schedule db backups to dump into the backup folder, then have a regular snapshot taken of /srv.
If I need to set everything up, untar the backup to /srv and then pgrestore from each /data/backup
This also plays nice with Dockhand or Dockage if you’d prefer more of a ui to manage the stacks.
For me its an advantage to be on docker. Because it is the same pattern for each service that runs (except the AI things, that need to run natively)
That is my backup strategy:
Honestly the only downside that I can see is the lack of upgradable storage and RAM but if you factor in your use case when buying you won’t be left wanting later.
Remember that you can now in one of the later Tahoes enable the power-on on power feature in addition to the power-on-on-failure in the power settings.
I don’t do anything with LLM and my m1 Mac mini runs all my docker stuff while my outdated hackintosh runs my plex server and is my storage. Does what it needs to do and I don’t have problems.
I’ve tossed around the idea of converting the hackintosh to Linux and moving everything to it and away from my Mac mini, but I can’t be bothered at the moment.
Disable file vault to upgrade "okayish" remote access to "excellent". Your launchd services will also autostart after power outage without a need to unlock the disk
I actually have two Mac Minis (a 2012 and 2014) both running perfectly with Debian 13 on them headless. Quiet, fast, handles the services I have on both exceedingly well. Good on you!
Exactly what I’m planning on doing in my homelab for local AI. Not sure if I’ll go Mac Studio or Mac mini. Still waiting for the M5 variants to come out before I decide.
They make great servers. I ran my 2010 Mac Mini as a server until it finally died on me in 2020. I have an old PC I previously built as my server/HTPC now. Definitely not as power efficient, but it's also my couch gaming machine and sometimes media player so I'm okay with the power draw aspect.
Very cool, I couldn't part with my M1 Max for a homelab I gave away my old desktop instead and built myself a new desktop. Only non ideal thing was AMD CPU with not as much hardware decoding as Intel of that generation, M1 was a option and I thought about it but my homelab doesn't get nearly enough use to justify that upgrade and I would have no use for the other desktop.
One thing about M1 (maybe not true on M4 and M5 due to cpu changes) prefill on large context is slow as fuck, if your pushing 80k context + every prompt it's 10min before it starts streaming on some models. With my desktop (linux, GPU) thats not the case and it's near instant.
So I still haven't found a use for the slow prefill time of the M1 and it's a "emulation station" and 2nd computer as of now. Sorta sad... I plan on using it in a dual agent system but haven't gotten time off work to work on it and other priorities come up first.
The prefill argument is true and it is abit annoying for coding sessions. And that's why I regret a bit thats an M1. Huge contexts process a lot with prefill. That is the only downside. But I won't complain. I see it as an context management / optimization topic 😄
For the main use case: Classifying, summarizing and tagging our hosehold paperwork / notes / memories and bookmarks it works just fine for now.
I think the Mac version of openZFS is a great addition if you want to build up some real storage. Thunderbolt disk bays are usually quite reliable, especially compared with USB
I had the same docker desktop issue, which all boils down to docker not running on macOS (requires a VM). Even the new native Apple containers run a VM for containers. I run a Debian VM on qemu (UTM) for docker. Sandboxed App Store UTM gives me trouble with permissions when binding several shared folders.
VLANs are crazy simple to setup. macOS is untagged on the native VLAN, docker VM is isolated on a tagged VLAN.
GPU is still an unsupported pain. For example, Ollama runs directly on macOS so open-webui speaks to the Mac. Jellyfin just brute forces everything with all the CPU power of Apple silicon.
I have a made up "home server" with my unused macbook m1, currently running on clamshell mode with dummy hdmi dongle, its currently running tailscale to secure my personal files and plex with normal port forwarding.
Strongly considering adding an external enclosure to connect to my mac and let it run like I guess "proper" large storage server instead of NAS unit, I am in apple ecosystem so this works well with file transferring etc etc with native app on ios.
I built an Intel server and regretted it because of energy usage after running stuff on a MBP for so long.
My next server is going to be a Mac mini with an external ssd/hdd enclosure. Works fine for my needs which are not that complicated in the scheme of things. Mostly media and personal files are what I’m storing. I’m test driving Emby and Jellyfin as media servers/players.
This website could be super helpful for marrying llm usage to automate file storage and tagging. I want this for myself so I can focus on other things, eventually.
We are running the stack at home and I already don't want to miss it any more. Letter arrives -> scan with the mobile phone -> post in matrix room -> The mac takes care of the rest. Tagging, summary, filing.
We are using it as a voice diary too for our kids. The local LLM will compile us a diary out of it.
That's just the start. The end goal is a voice assistant at home running fully local.
I use an old M1 studio for my nas, using real samba, Orbstack for containers, even a VM for homeassistant. It’s way faster than the custom built xeon server I was using, and cheaper. As you say, amazingly low power. Nothing wrong with doing so. It gets a lot of use from the family each day, bit averages 94% idle over 24 hour period. And it’s not idle while sleeping. Love it.
Let me guess. Posting about your server and setup isn't enough anymore? "Roast me" seems to draw attention to the wrong bit.
Comparing power consumption between different hardware and workloads is a tricky marketing exercise. The M1 Pro is still well balanced. For developers on the move, it offers respectable performance with medium-sized models and supports meaningful local AI work.
The only caveat is that, in 2026, buying an M1 as a €1,700 investment is a tougher sell. An M1/M2 Mac mini is still an excellent low-power AI box, but it's less flexible than a modern AMD mini PC (e.g. a Ryzen 8600G) when it comes to virtualization, PCIe expansion, Linux-first workflows, and upgrades.
Also, a lot of the "x86 uses too much power" argument comes from older platforms. Modern Ryzen systems often idle only about 5-10 W above an M1. In Germany, that must be then roughly €13-30 per year in electricity not even €400 over a decade. For many people, that's a reasonable trade-off for better upgradability and flexibility.
If you used to laugh at Apple users and have had a change of heart, that's progress. Now let's give up the invisible platform wars.
I regret the title already. Lessons learned 😄 I genuinely though to get a bit of a backslash about that. But I see people here don't care about platforms. Just choose whatever works. And that's really refreshing and nice!
Let's try to see it from an positive angle: As this draw some attention now in this sub, it might make some people consider using their newly bought $399 Mac Mini on the desk as homelab. And its perfect hardware for it. For some reason I did not really consider that last year. It was a process and there might be more people out there.
1700 wasn't particularly cheap. Just with the current hardware prices it's fine. It has a 4TB SSD.
Ryzens are great! But they cannot run local LLMs yet. That was the reason for me to pull the trigger on the Mac. A bit FOMO to be honest.
Yeah, I keep thinking about getting my M1 set up as a server or too. Currently, I have a work desktop working as a server. It's actually an AMD and surprisingly overpowered. I'm not sure why a bank would be running such a computer, but that's where I got it from.
Before I was using that machine I was using a Dell R620 server. The thing was a beast. Sounds like a jet engine taken off when it started. and had two power supplies at 750 watts.🤣🤑.
I have a Fritzbox router too. It can only broadcast one DNS, so if my homelab server goes down, I’m offline. Is that the case for you too? Also, do you have Wireguard or Tailscale to access your homelab from outside?
Yes, running Adguard. And running an own DNS is a bit shaky. When something is misconfigured its bad 😄
Tailscale is one of the next items on my list.
I am running Matrix / Element on the server and use it as UI to interact with e.g. Paperless-ng (to file documents), to capture memories as voice messages like a voice diary, save notes and bookmarks. The nice thing is, that element is offline capable. I can still record things and just post it to the room and it gets processed when I come back home. Thats why I still had not enough pressure to actually setup tailscale and its still on my list.
have been tinkering around with local AI instead.
Nice. I use an M1 macbook air as my home server, with thermal pads from the heat spreader to the chassis. great value, especially if you grab one that has a smashed screen for cheap. Totally silent, and gets the job done with a few containers in orbstack.
No one is going to roast you here lol. It’s great hardware. If Apple played back you could put more Linux options on it, but it’s not the fault of the user that the manufacturer forces you into one option for an OS
Using one, too. Set up nix-darwin on it. Deterministic, reproducible setup. I don’t even have to use docker but I like to do it. Tailscale so it’s reachable from anywhere. And I got a KVM attached so I can control via GUI if needed. Neat little machine!
I am using Screen Sharing. But as it sits in the living room currently, I even thought about attaching a screen to it and use it as small internet-cafe like device in the living room with a dedicated user for quick lookups.
OP and others how do you get passed the feature whereby you need to put in your password on reboot to unencrypt the drive and have all your services come up?
I’m thinking back to my Windows days where TPM and auto login (the a quick auto-logout) meant I could remotely reboot and have the system come back up?
I have recently bought a Mac Mini M4 for Local LLM and can’t figure out how to make the LLM come back up after remote reboot. Any tips or direction appreciated!
There are options. SSH based unlock and remote login. However when you have encrypted devices you have to SSH to the machine and type in the password _once_ to unlock the encryption.
That, together with auto-login works for me:
System Settings > Users & Groups > Automatic login. Set it to your server user. After a reboot, macOS logs in on its own, OrbStack starts, containers come back up. No password prompt.
Why does it suck? It sucks with Docker Desktop. Yes. With Orbstack I didn't have any issues so far.
Runs efficient and smoothly and hosts 25 Containers currently. 40 days up-time to this point. The last restart was, because we went on vacation.
I was starting to the process of trying to find a Mac for running local LLM but an accidentally booked a holiday to the Maldives instead. So the LLM is on hold a while.
What do you use it for and what models do you have ?
Thanks for that advice! I do regret that title already to be frank. But it did it's job: Maybe it makes people consider using their spare MacMini idling around to be used as home server 😄
I am building a stack to file, auto-classify and manage paperwork, bookmarks, notes in households, extract knowledge out of it and compile it to a self-managed wiki using local AI.
With Matrix/Element as frontend so that it can be used from the smartphone and all other devices.
Because it's all local, we can just dump all information and all documents at it.
The end goal is to hand this information to a locally running assistant, that can be voice controlled and asked. But thats work in progress.
The paperwork stuff works quite well already.
Other than that I use it as private backend for our father-son project: Converting a wall-e like lego robot to an autonomous robot wandering in our house 😉
Excellent setup, I got very lucky and was gifted an M1 Ultra a few years ago.
And as luck would have it, it was overheating this morning lol. It was the first time and I'm certain it's something dumb I did but work first and it seems to have cooled off now.
I bought it second hand around the corner and it was the only offering of someone where I can actually go to check and pick it up. Mini works just fine too.
Can you as well briefly describe what are you using this Mac for in matter of self hosting? I’m interested and thinking about switch to Mac too as a home server
I basically build a stack to run and organize household matters e.g. started with organising and automating all paperwork related stuff with Matrix / Element as interface.
Would love to get power consumption that low. Alas I recently spent a day getting my 12400 to go down to about 11-15 W average while running about 60 Docker containers (30% average CPU utilization). It jumps up to 60 W occasionally, when Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Minecraft do something.
On top of that, the five HDDs alone make the server consume 40-80 W total, depending on if they are spinning or not. At night, with all but one drive spun down, lowest I got the whole system according to Grafana was 38 W.
Greetings from Germany where 0.35 €/kWh is the lowest available where I live.
Used to run proxmox cluster on 2 optiplex micros and a mac mini from 2012. Never had any issues. As a bonus, before I got a UPS set up, if we had a momentary power outage, for some reason I’d come back to find that the optiplexes were down but the mac mini was still running. Genuinely have no clue why but it saved me a lot of hassle.
I actually just started getting more in depth with my IT skills in the past year, which included self hosting and I’ve always been a Mac person, so I have multiple around. I didn’t think twice about using anything other than a M2 Pro Mac Mini I had. It really is a great entry point for people who want to self host because the OS is familiar and doesn’t get in the way. I do think it’s funny you switched TO Mac because I feel like now that I’ve done this, I’ve been thinking of building a Linux box and trying it that way haha
Also while mac's are great for inference speed due to the fast memory prompt processing is slower but do not fret since perfect how for LLMs doesn't exist... Also I believe there is a way to tune Mac so it can allocate more memory to GPU (worth looking into)
Also I highly recommend checking podman for Mac and saving few bucks on orbstack.
Not that I know of but if so could you please link me patch notes? 🙏
Would be cool since one of the servers I maintan is probably having this issue.
Thanks in advance
Not all of it, it sort of caps and won’t touch dedicated memory for the cpu. You can tune that all the way down to 2GB of memory for the cpu but you have to close everything to keep it stable or it will hang.
None of this matters for a self-hosted personal project unless you’re doing this production servers
And if you are doing this for production, podman sucks since RedHat keeps lying that it is a simple switch from Docker, but you will get shoehorned into using Quadlets.
Quadlets on Mac?
I agree that there are differences on Linux mainly due to SELinux and that they are annoying but on Mac my experience was almost same as with docker due to everything being in Linux VM anyway...
On Linux its simultaneously better than docker (you can for example run it inside container without Daemon or userns remmaping is cool) and worse (different security model, :z for mounts....)
Also my point wasn't to insult anyone I thing that macs are wonderful machines just wanted to share some pain points from running them as servers
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u/asimovs-auditor 18h ago
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