Bandwidth use over a month.
I just saw a a ad for mobile Internet and started to wonder how much data is needed per month for a gemini server?
(This doesn't include being slashdoted.)
The options are 5, 10, 20, 40 and 100GB. How cheap can I be?
Feb 19 · 3 months ago
6 Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · Feb 19 at 18:13:
I mean you're talking a few KB per page if that. Unless you're hosting media 5 GB is ~1 million 5 KB page requests.
@darkghost what is that in terms of libraries of Congress or Olympic-sized swimming pools?
👻 darkghost · Feb 20 at 00:31:
Well it is 62,500,000 IBM punch cards, which, if burned all at once, releases the equivalent energy of 578 kg of TNT or a relatively small WWII era bomb. This energy is enough to heat an Olympic sized swimming pool by 0.19°C. I'm to lazy to figure out how much it would heat the library of Congress.
yes but dies it weigh more than a duck?!
👻 darkghost · Feb 21 at 00:12:
That's classified
Disclaimer: these statistics for my capsule are probably atypical for Geminispace as a whole. Rob's Gemini Capsule has been around for almost five years, it's linked to from many places (including a few on the WWW), and I rarely implement bot protection, since I host using AWS and Amazon is more than capable of handing extra bot traffic.
My capsule has received over 1000 requests per day every single day (except one) since 2025-12-07, and on nine of those days days it received over 10000 requests per day. The average was about 6500 per day, or 194600 per month. The outgoing bandwidth, as calculated by AWS CloudWatch, totaled around 150 MiB per day, or 4.5 GiB per month. Unlike request count, it's hard for me to get an exact figure for network bandwidth, because I sync some data to the server using Syncthing, and that eats up the majority of bandwith usage on certain days.
If you're running a Gemini server and no other processes that require outgoing bandwidth, I think 5 GiB is good enough. If you want to run other services, or if for some reason you expect your capsule to get huge amounts of traffic, 20 is sufficient, and 40 is starting to reach overkill. Don't bother with 100, unless you also want to use the VPS for extensive file transfers.