Re: [Guide] How to run a Bitcoin Core full node for under 50 bucks!
⭐ Merited by LoyceV (4)
From my experience, it doesn't make much sense to use less than 4GB since 4GB is very cheap to buy and it's much better in terms of performance than 2GB. I actually tried it once on a VPS and it was using swap like crazy 
You could prevent aggressive swap it if you reduce dbcache value (on Bitcoin Core) and swappiness value (on the OS). If you only need to run OS and Bitcoin Core, 1GB can do the job.
I'm not sure aobut dbcache since I haven't used it yet; so I don't know in which range it should be etc., but I'll look into it in the future for sure.
For now, I would like to share my experience with a node that I've setup a few days ago. It is one of my nodes that needed a bit of maintenance; it was quite cluttered and had outdated software so I rebuilt it from scratch. I will also post a guide about it soon (OpenSUSE node walkthrough).
The hardware is a laptop motherboard with 4GB RAM and 2 500GB HDDs.
After it had taken around a week to achieve ~40% sync, it was going super slow; around 1-2% a day, so I thought it may be a good idea to just plop in a second stick of RAM and see if it does anything. I kind of expected something to happen, but I was astonished at the speed it was going at afterwards! The HDD arm was moving much less now (audible difference); I suspect it was swapping a ton before, and the log was literally flying.
Here's a screenshot of some measurements I took; I let you guys guess at which point in time I upgraded the node from 4GB to 8GB
