Starting a Bitcoin Lightning Node

The main goal of virtualizing my server was so I had a way to separate projects that are vastly different into their own VMs. I also wanted an excuse to wipe my server clean and start fresh then just pull whatever data I wanted as it was needed. On a 2700X which has 8 cores, there’s enough wiggle-room for what I need to do but in the future I may need to get a new motherboard and CPU with more cores. I do have 2x16GB for my ram though so there’s definitely enough room there.

My newest project and what finally made me virtualize everything was starting a Lightning Node on the Bitcoin network. I’m using Umbrel to accomplish this and am currently waiting for the entire blockchain to download onto that VM’s drive. I found that 1 core and 2 GB of memory was making this process incredibly slow, so after a couple changes I’m giving the Umbrel VM 4 cores and 24 GB of ram except it is still running on my hard drive which is probably also slowing down the syncing process. Once it’s done syncing and only has to download a block once every 10 minutes I’ll bump it back down to 1 or 2 cores and give it 4 GB of memory unless I find out that’s not enough.

Umbrel has a cool UI and I might include photos of it working in a later post once my node is up and running instead of syncing the blockchain which might take days on an HDD.