System Requirements for Running an Avalanche Node
Hardware and Operating Systems
Avalanche is an incredibly lightweight protocol, so nodes can run on commodity hardware. Note that as network usage increases, hardware requirements may change.
- CPU: Equivalent of 8 AWS vCPU
- RAM: 16 GiB
- Storage: 1 TiB SSD
- OS: Ubuntu 20.04 or MacOS >= 12
Nodes which choose to use a HDD may get poor and random read/write latencies, therefore reducing performance and reliability. An SSD is strongly suggested.
Networking
To run successfully, AvalancheGo needs to accept connections from the Internet
on the network port 9651. Before you proceed with the installation, you need
to determine the networking environment your node will run in.
Running on a Cloud Provider
If your node is running on a cloud provider computer instance, it will have a static IP. Find out what that static IP is, or set it up if you didn't already.
Running on a Home Connection
If you're running a node on a computer that is on a residential internet
connection, you have a dynamic IP; that is, your IP will change periodically.
You will need to set up inbound port forwarding of port 9651 from the internet
to the computer the node is installed on.
As there are too many models and router configurations, we cannot provide instructions on what exactly to do, but there are online guides to be found (like this, or this ), and your service provider support might help too.
A fully connected Avalanche node maintains and communicates over a couple of thousand of live TCP connections. For some low-powered and older home routers that might be too much to handle. If that is the case you may experience lagging on other computers connected to the same router, node getting benched, failing to sync and similar issues.
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