The premise was straightforward enough. I had been running Foundry off my desktop, which meant every session depended on me not accidentally closing a window, and every module update happened while four people waited. A dedicated box seemed obvious. What was less obvious was how little that box needed to cost.
An N100 is not a fast processor by any measure that matters to a benchmark. It is, however, entirely sufficient for a server whose hardest job is passing JSON to five browsers and occasionally resizing a map. The interesting question was never whether it would work — it was where the ceiling sat.
What it handles without noticing
Five connected players, a scene with roughly two hundred walls, dynamic lighting on, and a dozen active modules. Idle draw sat around six watts, which is less than the router next to it. Load never meaningfully moved.
- Scene switching stayed under two seconds, which is faster than my desktop managed over wifi
- Token drag latency was imperceptible on the local network
- Compendium searches across four premium modules returned instantly
- Six months of uninterrupted uptime, one reboot for a kernel update
The bottleneck in a Foundry setup is almost never the server. It's whichever player is running it in a browser tab alongside thirty others.
The thing that broke it
Video. Specifically, a scene where I had been clever and used three looping webm backgrounds for water. The server itself was fine — it was streaming files, nothing more — but the moment two players joined on laptops with integrated graphics, the whole table degraded. That's a client problem wearing a server costume, and I spent an embarrassing evening diagnosing the wrong machine.
Put the Foundry data directory on the NVMe rather than an external drive, and set hostname before you do anything else. Changing it later means reissuing your certificate, which is twenty minutes you'll resent.
Six months in, the honest summary is that the machine is boring, which is exactly the review a server wants. If you're weighing a mini PC against a hosted plan, the calculus is less about performance than about whether you enjoy maintaining things. I do, some weeks.