Topic: Raspberry Pi 4 performance (Read 1374 times)

That's vague information, can you tell us :
1. Which RPi4 do you use (1, 2 or 4 GB)
2. Do you know if there are any bottleneck (either from slow internet connection or slow storage)?

I'm certainly too lazy to do that (i'm sure many users have same opinion), but i'll consider it if i ever broke my OS.


Depends on the job, i'd say it's great for job that can be done on terminal or without 3D acceleration.

I run local NAS server with RPi 4 24/7 and it's doing good job.

Yeah, that seems a bit slow. If you are on the high end of hardware.
RPi4 / 4GB / Samsung USB SSD / 300MB connection (before corona and everyone working from home killed my connection)  did if from scratch in under 10 days.
I keep feeling that towards the end of the sync when most block are full a spinning drive just kills performance vs. an SSD

-Dave

For those wondering how long it takes to sync,


549sec for 136 block

4 seconds per block

622262*4/60/60/24 = 28.8 days, assuming full block + segwit.

yeah, Raspi's have always had underpowered CPUs. The RPi4 is a step forward, but really because of the 2/4GB RAM variants. CPU is better, but not alot. I think it has more crypto instructions in the ISA (Cortex A72 I think), but not SHA256 sadly. Supposedly SHA256 acceleration only improves Bitcoin tx validation performance on x86_64 by 5%, but maybe the improvement would be bigger on a future RPi, as it would be improving from a lower performance baseline.

I have owned each and every rasp pi other then the 4.

they all feel and act so underpowered compared to a lenovo m tiny or a mac min or a dell micro or an hp elite.

i run a lot of those four units from four companies.

but they all have intels in them.

even though i use linux win 7 win 10 and mac os.

I have yet to get a rasp pi to feel powerful enough to run like the intel models. but i guess having a third set of cpus running a core is not a bad idea.

maybe i will spring for a rasp pi. 4

they have (arguably) at least 2 things going for them that Intel/AMD does not:

• reasonably programmable firmware
• cheap

in the case of this Wifi/HDMI crosstalk issue on the Pi4, the latter point is actually a downside. RPi product development has always been driven by low price tags, and that's also always been reflected in the reliability/performance.

But overlooking the first point is also unwise, there's not much point in an independent bottom-up currency being run on hardware with potential corporate backdoors (basically a rootkit operating way below the level of the owner's root access, and that can be accessed over the internet, even when powered over ethernet while the main power supply is switched off ). If the whole Bitcoin network was running on such hardware, then Intel/AMD could in essence be in possession of a Bitcoin off-switch.

I am fairly anti rasp pi 🕵️‍♀️.

They are underpowered and can’t quite get the job done.

there are so many used lenovo tiny pcs available that simply are 10 to 100x better then a rasp pi.

I don’t understand why try to push a rasp pi past what it can do.

especially if it is wallet involved.  A lenovo m700 tiny

used on ebay under 150.

  it can use both a m2 ssd and a 2.5 ssd and have 16gb ram.  does wifi well.

well, just that it sounds like an unusable piece of hardware (i.e. the WiFi chip when you're using HDMI displays of certain resolutions), so you may as well remove the driver module in case some other software on the Pi4 tries using the WiFi connection in future. In general, removing modules from the kernel you don't have a use for is a good idea, you can just compile it again should there be some module you later want to use

5GHz Wifi has shorter useful range, I would consider just connecting the Pi4 over ethernet cable (and removing the Wifi driver module from the kernel build)

Interesting, I use mine as a IPTV box now and I thought that the issues are  because of the heating problem but It turns out that is this jamming issue. After reading this artichel  I changed the resolution to 1080p it goes good. Try to see if this will help with your case as well it might be the same situation. I hope they find a solution.
 

I had some issues with the WIFI for a while with my RP4 and googled a bit for the problem. Surprisingly what I found is that HDMI is jamming it's own WIFI at 2560×1440 resolution, and I'm not the only one to have it, so this is something you should be aware of.

Here's the source and interesting read, short but interesting. > https://hackaday.com/2019/11/28/raspberry-pi-4-hdmi-is-jamming-its-own-wifi/
Anyone having issues with the WIFI?

yep

0.19 also adds 2 extra outbound connections to protect against a certain class of network-level attack. That means you're using slightly more memory than version 0.18 and before. So the 9% reduction in overall memory usage offsets that change nicely. Still a good idea to increase dbcache by at least 5% I would say, even if you're using the 1GB variant of RPi4 (and when you're syncing the chain, definitely use as much dbcache as you can temporarily)

As you know new bitcoin version is out.
In the Release Notes: Bitcoin Core version 0.19.0.1, I can read:


This might be worth noting when running bitcoind on a Raspi4.

my experience is only with a 3B+, and I ended up downclocking/undervolting the CPU to get it stable. Things like that and SD card wear make the standard Pi as delivered not suitable for server type applications, although....



.....that's a good track record! As I mentioned though, anything that makes much use of the SD card (i.e. swap, logging) will put your uptime into question. So using the SD just for boot (as you do for your PBX server) is a smart move.

I did ask in the forums, but it rapidly turned into a "must be you, can't be us" thing. Which I do accept as yes it might be my hardware, my config or something else but was looking to see if anyone else was having the issue. There are scattered reports of people seeing the same issue but not a lot so it's not just me. Made me wonder if other people were having the same issue and just did not notice. Only reason I did was that I was moving a large file and I saw the speed being less then what it was. Has it not taken 1 hour on Monday and 1 hour 12 minutes on Friday I would have never seen it.



Not sure where you got that idea from. Yeah, if you are putting them in a always running at max CPU / RAM you need additional cooling on the chips and possibly some other small changes. But for small embedded machines they are perfect. I have the following running:

1) Asterisk PBX since summer 2014 (probably should replace the SD card but it really juts boots it most stuff runs from the USB drive)
2) 2nd DB server for door control since about the same time probably later summer 2014. Could be off for all the use it gets, but rules say you need 2 DB servers.
3) The Pi-Hole & open VPN server was up from 2015 until I got my 1st RPi4 and wanted to play with it. It's actually the one running now as I wipe / re-create the one I am asking about
4) My torrent server on a RPi 3 from winter 2016/17


Agreed, when diagnosing issues with RPi it's usually this or an under powered power supply.
It's amazing how many people spend real money on cases and other things for their stuff and then go for the $1.99 power supply and SD card.

-Dave

I would look for any changes made to the

• linux kernel image
• linux firmware
• startup config (so, /boot/config.txt and /boot/cmdline.txt)

...relating to this latest update to Raspian, that's where any potential problems may have crept in. roll back to the old version to see if you can confirm the issue, then report that online (raspberry forums are best IMO for that)

these Pi-style computing boards are really not designed to be always-on servers, so getting them to work that way takes some additional effort. It can be done though.

there's another possibility: wipe an SD card too many times (or write too much to it in general) and you'll begin to increase unreliable behavior from the card, it's low quality flash memory that deteriorates quickly. It's better to use a SATA disk over a USB hub, particularly with the Pi4, as the Pi4 has a new SATA-over-USB protocol to improve that kind of setup (your USB hub needs to support the new protocol though)


I'll add that this happens because some Bitcoin miners decided to mis-use the protocol in a way that boosts the performance of their mining rigs.

and also to reiterate: this does not cause any problem, it doesn't matter in reality

benign warnings have been removed from normal logging before (1 just recently), there's a case to do that for this warning, or at least to change the text from "warning" to something more appropriate



this, however, will cause you a problem. I think we reached the point where 256GB disks were unusable a while ago

That warning is benign. There is no way to get rid of the warning, and that the warning exists does not cause any problems. You can safely ignore it.

I was near the end of downloading the blockchain data or blk??.dat when it started getting "warning 52 of last 100 blocks have unexpected version". I don't know what to do at this point!  I was able to figure out that when my 256GB SanDisk card got full, it was able to restart when I -prune=550 !  When I did the prune the 1st time, it started at 2019 for redo the blockchain! Maybe when I do a GUI, I'll do it next time when the blockchain gets full again on 2nd Raspberry Pi 4!  I keep looking for commands that would eliminate "warning 52 of last 100 blocks have unexpected version" so finish the blockchain download or go to GUI to finish downloading the Bitcoin blockchain.  I might get a 512GB SanDisk next time that'll cover the blockchain data.  200GB is not really enough for Bitcoin blockchain data anymore!

I have one running as a pi-hole and open VPN server.
There is a definite slowdown with it, it's not a "real" number for the pi-hole in the fact that it went from .26 seconds to .4 for a lookup it's still a 50% increase.
* The .26 number was from a test a while ago and the .4 is from today so I can't say when that slowdown happened.

The open VPN has dropped max throughput ~10% from Tuesday, that is where I really noticed it.

I'm going to wipe and start again, but I was wondering if it was just me.

-Dave