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Self-hosting my photos with Immich

(michael.stapelberg.ch)
659 points birdculture | 1 comments | 30 Nov 25 09:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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lucb1e ◴[06 Dec 25 17:57 UTC] No.46175221[source]▶
https://docs.immich.app/install/requirements

> RAM: Minimum 4GB, recommended 6GB

Wow. When factoring in the OS, that's an entire system's worth of RAM dedicated to just hosting files!

What does it use all this for? Or is this just for when it occasionally (upon uploading new pictures) loads the image recognition neural net?

I'd have to stop Immich whenever I want to do some other RAM-heavy task. All my other services (including database, several web servers with a bunch of web services, a Windows VM, git server, email, redis...) + the host OS and any redundancy caused by using containers, use 4.6GB combined, peaking to 6GB on occasion

> CPU: Minimum 2 cores, recommended 4 cores

Would be good to know how fast those cores should be. My hardware is a mobile platform from 2012, and I've noticed each core is faster than a modern Pi as well as e.g. the "dedicated cores" you get from DigitalOcean. It really depends what you run it on, not how many of them you have

replies(1): >>46175417 #
neurostimulant ◴[06 Dec 25 18:24 UTC] No.46175417[source]▶
It has modern features that requires relatively heavy processing such as facial recognition, finding similar images, ocr, transcoding videos, etc. I think it only needs those computing resources when you upload new images/videos.
replies(1): >>46178138 #
lucb1e ◴[07 Dec 25 00:42 UTC] No.46178138[source]▶
Any idea how much it uses when you're not uploading new pictures?

If it just needs it on occasion (and I can control when by not uploading at times where I'm using it for other purposes), that would probably be worth it since I have the spare capacity 99% of the time

replies(1): >>46178807 #
neurostimulant ◴[07 Dec 25 03:06 UTC] No.46178807[source]▶
I think you can disable machine learning stuff in the settings. And yes, you can control when the sync happen, or even have it only triggered manually and never automatically.

My instance when not running any photo/video processing job:

- immich server: cpu: 0.51% ram: 753MiB

- immich redis: cpu: 0.48 ram: 19.64MiB

- immich machine learning: cpu: 0% ram: 209.3MiB

replies(1): >>46183739 #
lucb1e ◴[07 Dec 25 18:17 UTC] No.46183739[source]▶
That's not little RAM, I wonder if it keeps the model on stand-by, but ~1GB is definitely more reasonable than 4-6! Thanks for sharing!
replies(1): >>46189102 #
1. neurostimulant ◴[08 Dec 25 06:33 UTC] No.46189102[source]▶
Forgot to add immich_postgres which uses ~222 MB of ram. If you already has a postgres running somewhere, you might be able to reuse it as long as its version >= 14 with pgvector installed.