Hardware Requirements - ckan/ckan GitHub Wiki

CKAN's hardware requirements are variable, dependent on the type of workloads a CKAN instance needs to support, and, the deployment and infrastructure approach (Virtual machines, physical machines, containers, etc.).

The following information is a good starting point, and you should monitor appropriately and adjust for your usage.

• As a minimum, The CKAN web server and worker should together have 2 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 60 GB of disk space available (less disk is sufficient if you are using a cloud storage solution for files)
• As a minimum, The supporting Database and Solr services should likewise have 2 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 60 GB of disk space available

From this baseline, consider the following:

• If you wish to deploy CKAN and all services on a single machine, either via source installation or via docker or Docker Compose, add the above requirements as your starting point.
• If you do not want to be constrained by disk IO, often a case with budget hosting providers, ensure you monitor IO performance (iostat -x -m 10 100 may be useful -- but ignore the first few lines)
• If you are doing local development with Docker Compose on a Mac or Windows machine, be aware that Docker performance can be significantly worse in these contexts, especially with regard to memory overhead and disk IO - adjust available resources, and expectations, accordingly

With the prevalence of Cloud based platforms these days you could still use the above spec as a rough guide to get started. Any larger implementation of CKAN will require careful consideration of scaling horizontally (more nodes per layer) and vertically (adding computing power ie: CPU, RAM & Disk)