Can a VPS with 2GB RAM handle Bitcoin Core?

I grabbed a spare VPS to test out Bitcoin Core, and it’s the only one that fit the disk space needs. I've set the maxmempool and dbcache to the lowest possible (5 and 6 MB). Right now, I've got about 1.2GiB free while running Core. No other apps are active on this machine. It's currently syncing at around block 450,000 in the initial block download. I know this setup is gonna put a lot of strain on the disk. But the disk and network are solid I’ve got an NVMe SSD and a 1Gbps connection. So, how long do you think it’ll take to finish validating? And is there a chance I’ll run out of memory before it wraps up?

And you probably should be concerned getting warning from the VPS provider. Probably no, people used to run full node on older Raspberry Pi which have only 1GB RAM. But you probably want to read https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/reduce-memory.md.

Without more info the last time I tried something like this which was close to a year ago it was just about 3 weeks. Memory, no. Patience perhaps. Do you have a complete fully synced node that you trust? You can just copy everything over. -Dave

What do you mean? @DaveF unfortunately, I do not have any other nodes elsewhere at the moment.

You should read Sharing for Bitcoin Core download: the cheapest pay-per-hour VPS I found for my experience. I think it will work, but I wouldn't do it. Disk I/O is shared and prolonged high load may get you suspended. I've used load limiting software on a VPS in the past on a VPS. I'm curious: did you get a VPS with 600+ GB NVMe and very little RAM? That's a weird combination. If pruning works for you, I can get you my copy of Bitcoin Core. I only have 300 GB available on the server so can't offer a full copy. I checked both my pay-per-hour VPS options, but the only ones with enough storage use HDD.

Any reason you don't run this locally? 1TB SSDs and some older i5/i7 machines are not that expensive anymore. As a few of us have discussed even NEW N95 based mini PCs with 16GB and 1TB are under $249 I know it's not an insignificant amount of money but paying every month will eventually cost you more. -Dave

Yes, I ordered that a month ago. This server was originally for backup storage, but I have since subscribed with a seed host and moved them there. My vendor lets me configure the specs of the server so I went with 2GB to make it as cheap as possible, but I quickly regretted not making it 4GB. This is a boutique host, with crazy stuff like 10Gbps Ethernet offered. But I will take your advice to move my node somewhere else. I'm just not sure where at the moment. PS: Pruning will not work for me, as my application requires a node with -txindex. I only intend to run it for a few days to conduct some testing. My ISP will definitely severely throttle my internet if I attempt to do that. (I do not exactly know what the fair use policy here is, but anything above 100GB will definitely trigger it.)

Sounds perfect for a cloud provider where you pay per hour. That sucks, which country is that? My laptop downloads 10 GB per day on average, and that's just one of many devices in our household. They never complain if I max out my connection for a few days.

It will constantly swap on the hard-drive unless something incremental happens. Judging from headline. I assume your not a big fan of judges. Like you would kill a great idea for fun. You told me it was immutable and I can go on about it all night. How big is the file? ay. You know the Answer. Cheers. Royal Classic. Always some percentage vol. You need top of the line hardware. Or go "tokenized". Web3. You add an "or else". I see who wants to talk about ownership. "Come and see my car..".

Let's just say it's a third-world country, which generally do not have much internet resources and DC (data center) bandwidth compared to first-world countries.

Ownership is about paying the bills. It's the same all over the place. I stopped listening.

Might be worth it in the long run if you download a bunch one month a bunch the next month and so on. Even if it takes 6+ months and some trips to someplace with free wi-fi if it exits, but in the end you would have a complete node. After that it's just copy the data to a new node when you need it and download whatever came down after you finished. Or, and I'm just putting this out there, someone here could download the blockchain for you and put it on an SSD and ship it to you. Yes, you would have to trust them but it might be worth it. -Dave

If the internet is bad, I kinda assume the post isn't very reliable either. But it could work, and OP can just rescan the blockchain to make sure it's legit.

As stated by @LoyceV, i refer to high and long disk I/O usage. Many VPS provider state it's against their ToS or acceptable usage. Here are few examples,

From what I've seen, cloud providers usually throttle your resources, so you can't (ab)use more than you're allowed. I prefer that over suspending the VPS.

Small status update: My node ran out of disk space (!) at around block 837,000 (!!) and aborted. Naturally, I am disappointed, but there is nothing I can do about it. Now starting Bitcoin Core again hangs at "Opening LevelDB at /root/.bitcoin/chainstate", and AFAIK, memory is not the issue here because I've got 1.5 GB free, but it's definitely stalling at the disk. I shall definitely go rent a dedicated server to run a proper bitcoin node on now. No, I haven't received any notices from my host.

That's a shame. Anyway, you might want to visit https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set to know current UTXO/chainstate size (currently it's about 11.6GB) if you ever plan to run pruned node on device with small storage. Good for you. Although based on @LoyceV experience, do you notice any resource throttling?

No, I haven't noticed that either. These VPSes run on KVM/libvirt and it would be impossible to throttle the disk throughput or IOPS while the system is running, anyway. It has never been shut down or rebooted. Network activity definitely can though, but that is not a problem as I have generous "unlimited" bandwidth. *Well, the fair use policy says up to 20TB outgoing is allowed, before throttling, though - and I am nowhere near that.

Throttling happens with cloud providers. I think VPS providers can only "steal" CPU.

Why renting a server and paying money for that to someone else when you can run your own node on any old computer at home? I saw one interesting video of a guy in UK who is living off-grid with solar panels and he is mining bitcoin all the time. You don't have to go off-grid and it's much easier to do this bitcoin nodes.