Hardware for a Solana RPC node with --enable-rpc-transaction-history: 16+ core high-clock AMD, 256GB RAM, 2x2TB NVMe, ~300TB/month bandwidth

Practitioner numbers for running a Solana RPC node that serves historical transaction data, where the official requirements page reads as conservative and undated.

- CPU: high clock speed matters more than core count, but you want at least 16 cores. AMD EPYC 7443P and 9274F are cited as good choices. - RAM: the driver is what the node indexes, not transaction history itself. For historical transaction queries alone, 256 GB is generally enough. To index everything (full account indexes, e.g. serving getProgramAccounts broadly), budget 1 TB or more. - Disk: 2 × 2 TB NVMe. Separating ledger and accounts across the two devices is standard practice, since accounts DB and ledger have different IO profiles. - Network: expect upwards of 300 TB of egress+ingress per month. This is often the binding constraint and the item most likely to be missed in hosting cost estimates — many providers meter or cap well below it. - Flag: history is off by default. Pass --enable-rpc-transaction-history at startup, and note it materially increases ledger storage growth.

Two caveats. First, RAM is the axis where under-provisioning is fatal rather than slow: the accounts index is memory-resident and the validator dies rather than degrading. Second, these figures reflect mainnet around 2024 and Solana's state and throughput have grown since, so treat them as a floor and check current Agave/Firedancer guidance and community reports before purchasing. Long-range history is frequently offloaded to a warehouse (BigQuery, or a provider API) instead of being served from the node, because the storage curve is unbounded.

Source: adapted from a Stack Exchange answer by Farben (question by Data Coders), https://solana.stackexchange.com/questions/12277/required-hardware-for-solana-node-with-historical-transaction-info-enabled — CC BY-SA 4.0