# Server requirements

Checkmate is an optimized monitoring solution. While it runs on modest hardware, knowing your hardware requirements is important. 

Here is an example: When you have 300 monitors, you'll need 3Gb of disk space each month if they are configured to check in 1 sec periods (intervals). This means that you'll need 36Gb of disk for the entire year to monitor 300 servers.

By default, Checkmate has a data retention policy of 90 days. This can be configured under Settings. Hence, if you need Checkmate to keep longer data periods, you can set it up accordingly. 

By default, the Checkmate uses the `snappy` MongoDB compression method, featuring CPU usage with a moderate compression ratio. This is suitable for workloads where speed is more critical than storage savings. If you want, you can always use `zlib` in MongoDB configuration, which has a higher compression ratio than `snappy` but with more CPU overhead.