Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150

Posted by t-3 11/19/2025

Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150(it-notes.dragas.net)

193 points | 76 commentspage 2

rootnod3 11/20/2025||

Of course zones and jails win a bit there, because they get their own native networking stack on the kernel instead of going through bridges.

Not much experience with Solaris zones, but FreeBSD jails and their vnets are amazingly good. They also don't lose much in translation. Say you run an Ubuntu 12.04 with a Debian 13 Docker image. Sure, it works, but it has to translate.

Jails have the restriction that a jail can't have a higher version than the host system. So there's (almost) zero translation involved.

My home stack is OpenBSD for the gateway/router, several FreeBSD machines (services, DBs, pkg build server, data storage/NAS) and another OpenBSD machine to run OpenBSD VMs via VMD and I haven't looked back since then. It's a stack that works with impeccable perfomance and equally impeccable documentation. Should the internet crumble due to another AWS us-east-1 or another cloudflare fuckup I can at least run my local stuff and feel confident enough to continue making changes to the system just based off the locally available documentation.

snvzz 11/19/2025||

It really should be "nginx static web hosting..." as it seems to be very specifically measuring nginx performance across OSs.

Otherwise, seL4/LionsOS webserver scenario could be tested.

Neil44 11/19/2025||

Imagine what a big piece of iron could do, it makes me think of the stories recently of people who came out of cloud and run everything of one or few bare metal hosts.

draga79 11/19/2025|

That's the point!

koakuma-chan 11/20/2025||

All these benchmarking utilities like wrk are notorious for not supporting HTTP/2. Why would you serve static content and not use HTTP/2?

YorickPeterse 11/20/2025|

At least one reason could be that `sendfile` is useless when using HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, as you can no longer just dump the contents directly onto a socket. Whether that actually makes a practical difference on modern hardware remains to be seen of course.

koakuma-chan 11/20/2025||

There is nothing that prevents you from using sendfile and HTTP/2 at the same time. You still dump the contents directly into the socket.

YorickPeterse 11/20/2025||

Yes there is: HTTP/2's and HTTP/3's framing of messages is such that you can't reliably dump a file as-is onto an HTTP/2 connection, as it may exceed the maximum size allowed by a frame.

koakuma-chan 11/20/2025||

You can dump only the necessary part of the file. It does not have to be the whole file at once.

LeoPanthera 11/19/2025||

Is there a guide somewhere to what low power CPUs exist in these new mini PC things? I feel like I'm increasingly out of touch.

n4bz0r 11/20/2025|

Mini PCs mostly run N-series Intel CPUs [0][1] nowadays AFAIK.

The cheaper and most popular one is N150 [2] which is a replacement for N100 [3]. The newer one boosts a bit higher. The 6-7W TDP in specs is a lie, but these CPUs still have fairly modest consumption working at about 10-20W on average.

There are some low power chips from AMD, but that's mostly NAS territory. Don't see them a whole lot and don't know much about them either.

[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/?f=codename_=Gracemont

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/?f=codename_=Twin%20La...

[2] https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/processor-n150.c4109

[3] https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/processor-n100.c3007

shadowpho 11/20/2025|||

N100/n150/n97 have similar performance. Power seems to be 6-12w at idle depending. Ram limited to 16GB usually. Low number of pcie lanes (NAS are limited). Cost used to be $100, but now it went up to $120+.

From amd side I have 4700u and 5700u, similar idle power (12w), similar cost ($200 with 32gb of ram, now more expensive). A lot more capable then n100, at a cost.

I use a whole bunch of mini pc in my lab, they are so much cheaper to run electricity wise (and cost)

nullify88 11/20/2025||

While the N100 document a 16gb limit, they are known to have no problems with a 32gb module. I run one myself.

hedora 11/20/2025||||

There are also higher power AMD devices that work extremely well.

If you’re willing to go up to 60W TDP and $500-1000, then they’re good enough to run recent steam games under linux at 1080p and LLM inference (if you spring for > ~32GB of RAM).

Like many others on this thread, I’ve had good luck with beelink.

zokier 11/20/2025|||

I just ordered few days ago a AMD 6850U based minipc (still on it's way). 15 watts TDP, 8 zen3+ cores at 2.7-4.7 GHz. On paper very good fit for minipc. Obviously zen4/5 would be nicer, but those are more difficult to find.

Big reason why I wanted AMD is that Intel officially supports only 16GB RAM on these N series chips. Also AMD has 20 gen4 PCIe lanes vs 9 gen3 lanes for Intel.

https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-7-pro-6850u.c276...

n4bz0r 11/20/2025||

> Big reason why I wanted AMD is that Intel officially supports only 16GB RAM on these N series chips.

I've read reviews from people who put 32GB sticks in these boxes no problem. Not sure why they put "16GB max" in the specs, that's just misleading. But the CPU you ordered is way more powerful so no grief there.

klipklop 11/19/2025||

Love these N150 systems. I wonder if the RAM/SSD/misc shortages are going to make these humble $140 boxes like $300+ soon.

transpute 11/19/2025|

Some N150 systems have integrated LPDDR5 from Chinese memory suppliers, who have been increasing production capacity, unlike Korean memory suppliers who have decreased production and increased prices in the face of higher demand. More NAND supplier competition needed.

klipklop 11/19/2025||

That is good news, but I have seem some sellers already jump their price +$100 on Amazon. Perhaps just price gouging to take advantage. I might pick up another if I can get it for ~$140.

proxysna 11/20/2025|

Pleasantly surprised to see SmartOS and zones used. Nice writeup.