So you’re saying your cloud provider is using a Mini-NUC? That doesn’t really sound like a plausible model… In my installations (about 10 extensions, typically) I always go for at least 8G of RAM. The new memory requirements for SNG7 are higher than before, and we know from discussions like Issues after upgrading to SNG7 that the system won’t even install in 1G and has problems at 2G (when installed on real hardware).
Back the original question: the forum has seen reports over the past year of several of these Mini-NUC PCs being problematic. On some, it’s the network cards, on some it’s the video. We’ve also heard from other users that the NUC itself works great and they are happy as can be. Clearly, there’s something else going on.
While “my enormous Server in the farm doesn’t have this problem” might seem like an interesting perspective, we still need to figure out what the catch is here. One good point, using something like ‘top’ or ‘free -h’ from the console may give us some additional insight into memory usage. There are lots of other things (in addition to memory) that can effect performance. it’s time to start doing some performance monitoring and trying to see where the jam up is.
There’s something in your system that isn’t working efficiently and it’s time to start troubleshooting. If you’re still experimenting, you could try installing using the ‘custom’ installation and do a headless or ‘text only’ install (you can use ‘ssh’ to log into the server later, and use a web browser from the local network to get into the GUI). This will tell you if the video card is the culprit. Looking at your logs (/var/log/messages, for example) might also yield some interesting data points.
The five-minute start could be lots of things, and getting into the /var/log/asterisk/full log file may yield some information. One thing that might be illuminating is the “ownership” process that the system goes through on first boot and the “fsck” the system does when the hard drive is shut down “dirty”. Both of those can take some extra time, so if the system is consistently taking that much time to book, it could be in the OS startup rather than the Asterisk/FreePBX startup.
The thing is, if you are serious about using this motherboard, you are going to want to get it set up so that it works reliably and efficiently. What you are describing as the current situation isn’t any of those things, so we need to move forward with some additional tests. There are plenty of people that can suggest tests that have worked for them, so let us know what you find when you start digging in.