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Comment by issafram | Hacker News Reader

I have a Pi 4 and ran Wireguard/PiHole on it for a few years before the SD card died.

I decided to install Ubuntu on a 6 year old Dell XPS computer. I now run Wireguard/PiHole strictly on docker and it is incredibly fast. Changed my settings to auto start the PC after a power loss. I haven't had any downtime for the containers. I'll stick to my custom docker compose file forever.

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The only thing is the higher energy consumption.

WireGuard shouldn't consume energy when idle. Turn off KeepAlive, if your network setup allows for it (on most platforms, the official WireGuard implementation can roam just fine).

I think they meant in case of the Pi vs Dell XPS

I don't use the expensive Pi devices and like the parent commenter, I use an old laptop with a 4 Gig VM, host Ubuntu, VM Ubuntu and it runs my kube cluster as well as a separate kube cluster on the host itself. If it used much power, my wife would be on me about it. PS I don't use Snap.

Significantly more though? I think people overestimate x86 idle power draw.

Does the XPS use a lot more power than the pi 4?

Of course it does. It’s probably still less than a few dollars a month

Would you share said compose file?

I can't speak to the Compose file itself, but I use Compose to run stuff myself on an intel NUC and it has been amazing. Orders of magnitude faster than a Pi, super stable, tiny, I just love it.

I even wrote a utility to manage the bunch of Compose files via git and automatically update them when I push changes to the repo: https://harbormaster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Thank You For Making And Sharing :D

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