Re:A Raspberry Pi 5 is better than two Pi 4S
by mort96 on Sunday October 08, 2023 @10:15AM
(#37810621)
Being idle most of the time doesn't mean you don't need compute, there's a lot of use cases (usually-low-traffic web servers, for example) where you're idle most of the time but when something actually happens, you want to handle it quickly.
I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to host a Nextcloud instance. It's sitting idle most of the time, but the weak CPU of the Pi 4 (combined with a fast connection and the fact that Nextcloud is a terrible pile of slow PHP) means that syncing lots of small files is actually CPU limited.
(Seriously, I set it up on the Pi 4 thinking that Nextcloud would be mostly IO limited. I wasn't considering the fact that its file syncing is based on WebDAV, and every single WebDAV operation is a separate HTTP request which goes to a freshly spun up PHP interpreter which has to go through all the work of connecting to databases and handle authentication and what not in order to write a 100 byte file to disk. Still, it works well enough for the small size and quiet of the Pi 4 is worth the trade-off.)
I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to host a Nextcloud instance. It's sitting idle most of the time, but the weak CPU of the Pi 4 (combined with a fast connection and the fact that Nextcloud is a terrible pile of slow PHP) means that syncing lots of small files is actually CPU limited.
(Seriously, I set it up on the Pi 4 thinking that Nextcloud would be mostly IO limited. I wasn't considering the fact that its file syncing is based on WebDAV, and every single WebDAV operation is a separate HTTP request which goes to a freshly spun up PHP interpreter which has to go through all the work of connecting to databases and handle authentication and what not in order to write a 100 byte file to disk. Still, it works well enough for the small size and quiet of the Pi 4 is worth the trade-off.)