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Re:Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your... by motorest on Sunday June 08, 2025 @03:48AM (#44215392)
> My laptop from 2011 idles at 8W, with two SATA SSDs.

some benchmarks show the Raspberry Pi 4 idling below 3W and consuming a tad over 6W under sustained high load.

Power consumption is not an argument that's in favor of old laptops.

Re:Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your... by kassner on Sunday June 08, 2025 @04:09AM (#44215489)
> tad over 6W

That is the key. The RPi works for idling, but anything else gets throttled pretty bad. I used to self host on the RPi, but it was just not enough[1]. Laptops/mini-PCs will have a much better burstable-to-idle power ratio (6/3W vs 35/8W).

1: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2022/03/16/update-to-my-zfs-ba...

Re:Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your... by motorest on Sunday June 08, 2025 @05:14AM (#44215749)
> That is the key. The RPi works for idling, but anything else gets throttled pretty bad.

I don't have a dog in this race, but I recall that RPi's throttling issues when subjected to high loads were actually thermal throttling. Meaning, you picked up a naked board and started blasting benchmarks until it overheated.

You cannot make sweeping statements about RPi's throttling while leaving out the root cause.

Re:Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your... by kassner on Sunday June 08, 2025 @06:12AM (#44215958)
amd64 processors will have lots of hardware acceleration built in. I couldn’t get past 20MB/s over SSH on the Pi4, vs 80MB/s on my i3. So while they can show similar geekbench results, the experience of using the Pi is a bit more frustrating than on paper.
Re:Self-Host and Tech Independence: The Joy of Building Your... by dd_xplore on Monday June 09, 2025 @03:45AM (#44222265)
RPi is amazing for IOT tasks cuz it’s pretty portable but not for running general purpose server tasks, you’d get better performance per watt with used gear