# Use Pogo Plug computers dirt cheap, high node clusters?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-pogo-plug-computers-dirt-cheap-high-node-clusters/6238>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [December 27, 2011, 12:30am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-pogo-plug-computers-dirt-cheap-high-node-clusters/6238 "2011-12-27T00:30:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![drahmel7](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/drahmel7/32/2967_2.png) [@drahmel7](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/drahmel7)\
**Post date:** [December 27, 2011, 12:30am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-pogo-plug-computers-dirt-cheap-high-node-clusters/6238/1 "2011-12-27T00:30:29Z")

</div>

I'm been playing around with this -- more for fun than profit -- but I  
thought I would share and get some ideas.

I have 3 Plug computers (Seagate Dockstar) that I bought for around  
$30 a piece. These are cool full mini-Linux servers where I've  
installed Arch Linux and OpenSDK. Each I have attached a cheap 500GB  
drive that ran me about $60. So my per-server cost (with tax) is just  
over $100.

Last night I loaded ElasticSearch on each one and put them into a  
cluster. These boxes don't have much RAM (128MB), so I dedicated 100MB  
to each Elastic instance and it seems to run pretty well with this  
simple configuration.

Although this is just play right now, it struck me that you might be  
able to create a cheap, high node cluster with Dockstars.

Maybe you could configure them as "node.data:true" servers to store  
all the data, create the index with a high number of shards, and then  
have one normal machine with decent RAM be the "node.master: false" /  
"node.data: false" search load balancer to aggregate result sets.

Is this too little RAM per node to allow Elastic to function  
effectively? Are there some other systemic problems that would make  
this simply a waste of time?

Please let me know what you think!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Jamshid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ecd19e/32.png) [@Jamshid](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jamshid)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2012, 4:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-pogo-plug-computers-dirt-cheap-high-node-clusters/6238/2 "2012-01-03T16:37:35Z")

</div>

On Dec 26 2011, 6:30 pm, danr [drahm...@gmail.com](mailto:drahm...@gmail.com) wrote:\> ... Last  
night I loaded Elasticsearch on each one and put them into a

> cluster. These boxes don't have much RAM (128MB), so I dedicated 100MB  
> to each Elastic instance and it seems to run pretty well with this  
> simple configuration.  
> ...  
> Although this is just play right now, it struck me that you might be  
> able to create a cheap, high node cluster with Dockstars.
> 
> Maybe you could configure them as "node.data:true" servers to store  
> all the data, create the index with a high number of shards, and then  
> have one normal machine with decent RAM be the "node.master: false" /  
> "node.data: false" search load balancer to aggregate result sets.
> 
> Is this too little RAM per node to allow Elastic to function  
> effectively? Are there some other systemic problems that would make  
> this simply a waste of time?

You'll definitely want to test. Cool idea, but I'm not optimistic that  
elasticsearch will do well with such little memory, even if you have a  
lot of nodes.

Sorry I don't have numbers, but I tested some low-memory nodes and  
kept getting OutOfMemoryException's at roughly the same number of  
documents indexed, even after adding nodes and increasing shards.

--Jamshid

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 3:43am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-pogo-plug-computers-dirt-cheap-high-node-clusters/6238/3 "2017-07-06T03:43:57Z")

</div>