[XTension] New Mac mini

[james at sentman.com]

I think that is a very powerful machine and should be able to do everything. My house mini server is a 2018 6 core Intel with only 16gb of ram and it is running all the video and other things here without any problems or memory pressure and swapping or anything like that. I have 13 video sources but they are rarely all recording at one time, even so that has not been a problem. Some of those are just testing streams for new devices and such but they are all sitting there in memory without any difficulty.  I covet a new M1 machine but just don’t need it yet and so cannot justify it to myself for my own home server!

If you have the option of upgrading the memory to 32 (or more) that would be great, and future proof you even further, but I do not think it’s necessary for what you describe.

One thing I would recommend is booting the machine from an external SSD drive. You can use a rather small and inexpensive SSD drive of around 500gig even for that, but a 1TB would be better if  you’re going to be caching iCloud stuff. The reason for this is that Apple’s internal SSD are not replaceable and, like batteries, are a limited lifespan item. XTension and XTdb try to cache as much stuff in memory as possible and only write to disk when absolutely necessary, but even so running all this and the caching on the device will cause lots of writes to the SSD which will more rapidly use it up compared to a machine that is not running all this stuff. I boot mine from an external raid drive that has 2 250gb laptop SSD drives in it setup as raid 1 so if either one fails the other will keep going until I replace it. Every night I clone the external drive to the internal drive via Carbon Copy Cloner so that should someone trip over the cord to the little raid drive it will likely successfully boot from the internal instead and that is only 1 large re-write event every day rather than many every few seconds if it was booted from them.

Also make sure you setup the energy saver preferences to wake up or startup every day at some time. This way if everything fails and the device cannot restart after an extended power failure it will at least restart within the next 24 hours. I used that to great effect after we had to evacuate for a hurricane several years ago. I wasn’t here to push the button but it tried every day until the power came back and then it rebooted itself and woke up even though we weren’t here.



> On Jul 26, 2023, at 1:26 PM, scott <scott at macplus.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello guys,
> It is time for me to upgrade my xtension machine.
> 
> Is this Mac mini powerful enough?
> Apple M2 with 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
> 24GB unified memory
> 1TB SSD storage
> Gigabit Ethernet
> Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI port, two USB-A ports, headphone jack
> It will be primarily to run xtension and I am planning on adding the camera interface also.
> 
> But I will also want it to act as my head of family iCloud machine and control our shared calendars, contacts,
> And if possible maybe do some pre filtering of multiple email accounts.
> 
> This will be my first Apple silicon machine and the ram seems small to me.
> What do you all think?

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com



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