Home Lab 2023

Much Better Late than Never …

A software developer and DevOps engineer with 24 years of experience established a home laboratory to conduct experiments in software development, operations, and performance testing. The setup intentionally uses moderate computing power from mixed sources — personal equipment and office surplus — emphasizing efficiency as a design principle rather than raw processing power.

Lab Hardware

• Raspberry Pi — connected via home WiFi on Askey Wave 2 router
• Apollo — Ubuntu on Dell Precision workstation (8× Intel i7 processors, 32 GB RAM)
• Artemis — WSL2 on UM700 system (4× AMD Ryzen 7 processors, 16 GB RAM)
• Netgear FS108 Switch — 100 Mbps network capacity

Testing Framework

Prometheus and Grafana are deployed on the Raspberry Pi for monitoring. The Siege load testing tool is configured against an Nginx web server hosting two test images:

• Holi2019.jpeg — 1 MB
• Autumn.jpeg — 6.5 MB

The objective: determine whether the network infrastructure could sustain the 100 Mbps specification limit of the switch.

Test Results

1 MB Image

Transactions:       1600 hits
Availability:       100.00%
Throughput:         11.20 MB/sec

6.5 MB Image

Transactions:       1600 hits
Throughput:         11.24 MB/sec

Both tests achieved approximately 11.2 MB/sec throughput with 40 concurrent connections across 40 requests each — confirming the network runs at its full 100 Mbps capacity.