Ethereum Mainnet Full Node

Client Resource Usage

Consensus Clients (Lighthouse)

Client	Version	Date	DB Size
Lighthouse	4.5.0	Jan 2024	~130 GiB	~5 GiB

Comment:

• Lighthouse, Lodestar and Prysm can be resynced in minutes to bring space usage back down, with ./ethd resync-consensus

• Lighthouse is working on tree states to continuously prune

Execution clients

For reference, here are disk, RAM and CPU requirements, as well as mainnet initial synchronization times, for different Ethereum execution clients.

Client	Version	Date	DB Size	DB Growth	RAM
Erigon	2.56.1	Jan 2024	~1.7 TiB	~7-8 GiB / week	See comment

Comment:

• Erigon will have the OS use all available RAM as a DB cache during post-sync operation, but this RAM is free to be used by other programs as needed. During sync, it may run out of memory on machines with less than 32 GiB.

• Erigon does not compress its DB, leaving that to the filesystem

Eth Docker QuickStart

1️⃣ Create a New User (if needed)

adduser ethuser
usermod -aG sudo ethuser
usermod -aG docker ethuser

Then, switch to the new user:

su - ethuser

1. Install Required Dependencies

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y git curl wget

1. Install Docker and Docker Compose

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo bash
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Verify the installation:

docker --version
docker compose version

docker ps
./ethd status

1. Download and Configure Eth Docker

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/eth-educators/eth-docker.git
cd eth-docker

1. Install Eth Docker

./ethd install

1. Configure Eth Docker

./ethd config

If you do not plan to be an Ethereum validator, you can skip entering an address.

Select clients:

• Execution Layer: Erigon

• Consensus Layer: Lighthouse

Enable monitoring with Grafana.

If you want to use the recommended setup, add the following line to .env:

COMPOSE_FILE=lighthouse-cl-only.yml:erigon.yml:grafana.yml:grafana-shared.yml:el-shared.yml:cl-shared.yml

1. Start the Ethereum Node

./ethd up

This will start all containers in Docker.

1. Check Node Status

docker ps
./ethd status
./ethd logs execution

1. Stop and Restart the Node

To stop:

./ethd stop

To restart after changing settings:

./ethd up