Depends on your composting style and how quick you want finished product, and a bit on how you want to use your compost. And what you got to compost.

You can go as small as a half gallon jar stuffed full of greens to make an extract to hot bins of a few feet in every direction that you turn on the regular. It sounds like you might not like cold composting since that is very slow by comparison to hot composting. Some people like to use tumblers for kitchen scraps, or set up worm bins.

There is a bunch of folks over in the composting area that are all great at it. Many have different styles.

Have a look over on https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/soil

Plenty of discussions over there.