How much can I do on a single Pi with Portainer

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MikeAqua

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#324135 4-Mar-2026 12:29

Previously, I've used a bunch of Pi's to do different things because I'm lazy, they're cheap second hand and it's easy. For example I had Pihole-Unbound running on

I'm trying to up my game and move to a smaller number of Pi's running multiple applications via Portainer. I'm wondering how far I can push this.

I have a Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM, an official cooling fan and I'm looking at a USB SSD for it. Maybe this one

I'm using the full 64-bit OS, but there's no reason I couldn't start again with the headless version if that helps.

So far, I have docker and portainer working with a Pihole-Unbound stack. Tonight's project is to add a Prometheus-Node Exporter-Grafana stack, so I can see CPU temps etc. Then watchtower. Future candidates include a media server - I'm keen to try Jellyfin. The house has some smart devices (whiteware, irrigation, locks, HVAC, lighting and one power socket), so I thought I would have a play with Home Assistant as well. I should point out this is all just faffing around/self education.

So that's: -

PiHole
Unbound
Prometheus
Node exporter
Grafana
Jellyfin
Home Assistant

(I know I could ditch Prometheus et al and just use HA, but I'm keen to learn about all these systems)

What I don't understand is how much I can expect of a single 8GB Pi4B? Would I be better off getting a 16GB Pi5, with an NVME and POE hat?

Mike

michaelmurfy

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#3466698 4-Mar-2026 13:17

You'll struggle with Jellyfin as soon as anything requires transcoding. Instead, you're better to have a PC with at-least a Gen 8 Intel processor for Quicksync support then you can whack Proxmox on it.

Instead of PiHole + Unbound you could try Technitium - https://technitium.com/dns/

Grafana, Home Assistant can be quite heavy too. While it may run together I think you're really testing the limits of a Pi!

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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richms

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#3466710 4-Mar-2026 14:25

If you are wanting a transcoding machine then I done it on a crap $6 8th gen celeron from aliexpress and it was fine with 1080. I have not had any need to transcode 4k yet so was not testing it when it was in use. Since upgraded that machine to a 9th gen i5 and forgot that I needed onboard graphics when shopping aliex for CPU so have a GPU in it now. Not tried transcoding on it as its back on windows for other reasons.

Richard rich.ms

Groucho

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#3466714 4-Mar-2026 15:01

MikeAqua:

I have a Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM, an official cooling fan and I'm looking at a USB SSD for it. Maybe this one

If you weren't aware Raspberry Pi now manufacture (or rebrand) their own SSDs which are fully compatible with a Pi and pretty good value for money.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ssd/

A couple of months ago I bought one of their 512GB SSD's from PBTech for $90.88 but doesn't look like they have any of these SSDs of any capacity in stock now. For a Pi4 it also requires a USB enclosure like this one I bought whereas a Pi5 you can buy a HAT.

johno1234

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#3466731 4-Mar-2026 16:03

4B 8G running PiHole, Homebridge and Scrypted. Doesn't raise a sweat.

timmmay

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#3466735 4-Mar-2026 16:15

I have an 8GB Pi4 running these containers:

Home Assistant
AppDaemon (integrates with HA and receives all its events)
CloudFlare tunnels
File Browser (lets me share files with friends)
Grafana (not used much)
InfluxDB (HA sends a few things to it)
Uptime Kuma (well used)
Lazy Docker (rarely used)
Nginx (reverse proxy for everything)
Pi Hole
PostgreSQL (for HA)
Restic backups
SyncThing
Trillium Next (knowledge management like EverNote but free)
Watchtower

It handles all those easily. A 4GB pi would do just as well, only 2100MB RAM the rest is cache, though I don't always have a few of those turned on like File Browser and Grafana as I don't use them that often.

MikeAqua

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#3466869 4-Mar-2026 20:37

Thanks @timmmay that's really encouraging

So far I have:

Docker
Portainer
PiHole
Unbound
Rpi-monitor
Watchtower
Gotify

I had some trouble with repeated push messages saying Watchtower container (v1.25) I had installed was too old. At least I knew I had Gotify running correctly! I managed to pull a newer version and that fixed it.

Mike