Question: What are the minimum hardware requirements for MongoDB?

Answer

The minimum hardware requirements for MongoDB depend on the nature of your application, the size of your data, and your specific performance needs. However, for development purposes or small production deployments, there are some general guidelines you can follow. It's important to note that these are baseline recommendations and your requirements might be higher based on your workload.

CPU

• Development: At least 2 cores.
• Production: The production environment should ideally have at least 4 cores. For high-performance applications, more cores are recommended to handle higher levels of concurrency and processing.

RAM

• Minimum: 2 GB for development environments.
• Recommended: For production environments, 8 GB is typically the starting point, but MongoDB performs best when the working set fits into memory. Therefore, having RAM that equals or exceeds your data set size significantly enhances performance.

Disk

• Storage Type: SSDs (Solid State Drives) are strongly recommended for all production deployments. They provide better performance, especially in terms of latency and IOPS, compared to HDDs (Hard Disk Drives).
• Size: This depends greatly on your dataset size. Always plan for more space than your current dataset to accommodate growth, indexes, backups, and replication.
• Configuration: RAID 10 configurations are recommended for a balance of redundancy and performance.

Network

• A gigabit network is recommended for deployments involving sharded clusters or replica sets to ensure fast data replication and query responses across nodes.

These guidelines serve as a starting point. MongoDB's performance can significantly depend on factors such as indexing strategies, document structure, and specific application queries. Monitoring resource utilization and adjusting hardware allocations based on actual usage patterns is crucial for maintaining optimal performance.