The time has come to upgrade my witness server. I started to sync a bit late and went to bed before it finished. I put the final touches to activating the new witness server this morning before leaving for work ;) Here are the main specs:
Xeon E3-1275 v6 @ 3.80GHz
64GB DDR4 2400MHz ECC RAM
2x 512GB NVMe
1Gbps port
The new server should do me good for a while. The blockchain just grows so fast. I remember when I became a witness in January 2017, the blockchain was about 8GB in size. Now it's at about 160GB.
The SSD drives were running out of room. So I have more than double the space I had before, and top-notch NVMe instead of SSD this time around. I should be good to store the chain for some time to come :)
I had a Xeon E3-1246 v3 @ 3.5GHz before, and I think I notice a slightly faster processing of the chain to get the node up. The drives should make a difference. SSD is about 5x faster than HDD, and NVMe is about 5x faster than SSD, and 25x faster than HDD! I'm blazing now!
Disk space is relatively cheap, but RAM is used to process parts of the chain as a shared_memory.bin file which also keeps growing. The size of the blockchain is worrisome to think about for the future. As more people join and post, it will just get bigger at a quicker rate of expansion. Unless the value of STEEM keeps up, more and more witnesses will drop off from the list from being unable to cover costs. Eventually there may not be a top 100, but less than 100, then less than 90, and so on, until only huge RAM servers can sustain the blockchain.
Let's hope for a bright STEEM future :)
On a less bright note, I awoke this morning to see that I dropped 14 spots in the witness list (down to 93). I lost support from a major voter, 
Thank you for your consideration and support. Peace.
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