Topic: Raspberry Pi 4 performance - page 3. (Read 1307 times)

I believe our ISP or other internet infrastructure has limited the throughput to my raspberry. Maybe someone thought +100GB/day is excessive for a single device 
The sync speed dropped significantly over night. So did CPU usage (and temperature). As far as I can tell, it's limited by the network as neither CPU or disk are loaded.

Screenshot:
http://too-hot.dk/storage/temp/rpi_btc.png

But 45% done after about 20 hours are not bad either :-)

Heat management has been a major concern with RPI4. Unfortunately it's limited by technology. You only get a certain amount of MIPS per watt at a certain technology node. (btw. I used to work for Intel).
RPI4 manages it pretty well i.e. throttles down the clock when temperature exceeds 80C - it's built for operating at those temperatures (I hope). So you can either accept a slight decrease in performance at high workloads or add some heat dissipation capabilities. Or play around with under-volting/under-clocking if that's your thing.
I just got a small heatsink for now (http://too-hot.dk/storage/temp/rpi_heatsink.png) which helps quite a bit. As you can see, it's at 60C with the moderate load. It still reaches 80C at full load though even with this heatsink (however, that requires more active processes than 'just' bitcoin).
There are a lot of cool cases for the RPI4 comming out, where the case is made of aluminum coupled to the CPU.

I have the feeling that heat sink are a unwelcome news for Pi4 owner, and the result of a poor design choice from Raspberry.
Heat sinks are bad for at least three reasons:

• They are dust collectors and need to be cleaned to maintain efficiency, while this HW should be thrown everywhere and keep functioning for years to come without being touched.
• They prevent the use of external cases to keep the board cleaned (see above)
• They are aesthetically horrible (If you don’t agree with the “throwaway statement” and you think you want to see your node)
• I have a bad feeling for a heat sink being necessary on an hardware that it is used for his reliability, when delivering an unrequested (yet welcome) performance boost.

Oh such a nice thread, my RP 4B 4gb is on its way to me so when it comes (and hopefully I'll have enough time to play with it) I'll post some stats as well. Waiting to get FTTH sometime by the end of the month, then I can give real values.

I have some old laptops laying around - i3,i5, maybe I can make a comparison between them.

I left it sync'ing at my workplace. Will be interesting checking the status tomorrow to see if it could keep up the pace with the larger blocks.
I have a small passive heatsink on the cpu. It gets hot but sync'ing seems to be mostly a single core activity so it doesn't feel critically hot. Don't think it throttled down.
RAM usage was in the range of 1.3 GB when I checked, so don't go for the 1GB variant. It's running raspbian buster lite.
There's plenty of bandwidth to the external SSD through the super-speed USB connection. Also the gigabit LAN is no bottleneck.

Yeah, CPU temp and eventful heat induced throttling are something I am very interested into.
Blockchain verifying is a CPU RAM intensive tasks, so heat should be a thing to care about.

Fyi. in case others are still interessted.

I got a fresh raspberry pi 4 Model B (4GB), connected a SSD using USB-SS and started sync'ing on a fast internet connecting.

After just a few hours I'm at 16% progress with >40GB downloaded and estimated 24 hours left.

Compared to older raspberries, the 4 are blazing fast 

The problem is validating the blockchain is a pretty single core intensive task so Raspberry type of devices are always going to be very limited in this area unless they can somehow keep pushing clock speeds without sacrificing other things.

Perhaps the best candidate is the Lenovo x200, at 2.4ghz it should be enough, then you've got the fact that you can Libreboot it which is pretty cool considering you are removing all the proprietary blobs that come with the clusterfucks formerly known as BIOSes.

Yeah  I use them..  

 but used mac minis are pretty much bullet proof in comparison.
you can do linux if you chose.

and

small dell
small lenovo can be found cheaply.


here  are some low cost lenovo


https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-M92p-Tiny-i5-2-9GHz-8GB-500GB-Win-10-Pro/332379682378?

If you really look  sometimes you get them at 100 bucks

some cheap mac minis

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Mac-Mini-Desktop-2012-i5-2-5GHz-4GB-500GB-HDD-C-Warranty/273868158121?

when lucky I get them at 100-125

use this ssd dock

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Blackmagic-Design-MultiDock-2-4-SSD-Port-Thunderbolt-2-Loop-Through/264393927328?

I got mine for 265 on a close out.

they all just work so much better then the rasp pi's  and they don't use a lot of power.

the toughest one to get a bargin  on is the dock from blackmagic.  But it is a 10 year to 15 year item.

I both love and hate RPi units.
To say they are not up to the task is not quite fair, they are up to it but barely.
The 4 (if it was not for the heat issue) is more then up to it.
It's when you are using your RPi as a node & a pi-hole & open VPN front end for your home network all at once you really see problems.
I am actually using the one I got from from the Avalon deal that never happened as a smart controller in the condo.

I have an PowerEdge server running Hyper-V that handles most of my "heavy lifting" but I also have many a RPi sitting around doing stuff too.

The nice thing about them is to play they are cheap and simple.
And, you can power it down from bring your node, swap in a different SD card and now it's back to being your VPN server, power it down again and put in another SD card and it's doing something else.

Do I 100% rely on it. No.

As with everything, YMMV.

-Dave

I misread your previous comment “hundreds of thousands miles away” and I was more worried about your holiday habits than USB reliability !
I get the point: reliability can be issue also with small amounts.

a defining characteristic of unreliability is: it's unreliably unreliable

a USB disk crashing your Pi node is ok when you're only an hour away from where you're running the node. But if you're on vacation hundreds or thousands of miles away, you may find that annoying.

I have been running my personal BTC+LN node on a Raspi3+ for months now (link to my guide to do so in signature) and I hadn’t a single issue.
I agree USB connections are “ shaky” in theory compared to SATA, but, touch wood, I hadn’t any issue so far.
Of course my node is “for fun”, not holding millions there. If I had to store a lot of money I would walk the extra steps.

sort of disagree (sort of)

storage is really what holds the Pi back these days. CPU did before, but not since the rPi 2. You can get around the SD card issues by using the most modern rPi's (3B+), as they allow you to boot from a SATA disk, bypassing SD cards altogether.

But really, USB storage, SATA or not, is less than ideal. You can get a Rock64 pro single board for less than $100. You can also get an NVMe or SATA PCI-E expansion card for the Rock64 pro (it has only 1 slot). And there's a 4GB version, you could run a lightweight hypervisor on that, and get a securely compartmentalized home Bitcoin node, + run other stuff in different VMs (it'd have to be without a desktop GUI, naturally)

Rasp pi are simply not made for this task.

Cheap used Lenovo tiny PCs do a better job.

Dell has a good small unit. Buy a used one. Many will hold a nvme and a ssd.

I use Mac mini’s 2012 model and or 2014 models.

I clone a backup os with a wallet . And away I go.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out why my node stopped responding now and then. And someone else on another forum was having issues with theirs overheating.
So I put a small fan on it and went to look around, and saw that it is happening to a lot of people. Someone someplace cut some corners that they should not have when designing the 4

-Dave

Well this is something undoubtedly serious and needs to be taken into account while tinkering with a Raspi4 to run a Bitcoin full node. I like them quiet and reliable, tossing on desks and basically expecting them to work indefinitely. Of course heat is a very dangerous element to have on such a tiny device.
Thanks for pointing us in the right direction.

So, the RPi 4 generates a crap more heat from it's CPU then previous models.
Some people are having thermal throttling in under 5 minutes of heavy use.
So I give you the 52Pi Ice Tower

https://www.seeedstudio.com/ICE-Tower-CPU-Cooling-Fan-for-Raspberry-pi-Support-Pi-4-p-4097.html

Toms Hardware Review Link:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/52pi-ice-tower-raspberry-pi-4-cooler,6259.html

If you want something a bit more sane:
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/fan-shim

I'm not just posting this for laughs, I had my 4 thermal throttle while nothing but bitcoind was running.

-Dave

Totally agree.
System must be engineered to avoid bottleneck.
This  is what I tried to avoid setting up my Bitcoin node guide (in signature)as you can see if you check hardware page

SLC SSDs are mostly used for server applications and they are going to be harder to obtain for an average consumer. MLC drives are still widely available. QLC drives seem to be priced about the same as TLC ones (at least in my country) while being less durable.



Wasn't it Total Bytes Written (TBW) by any chance? If TBW is exceeded then the warranty is void, but the drive still can work for a decent amount of time. Also, the controller is a very important factor. If it breaks then all of the data becomes unrecoverable in most cases.

what to look for:

• NAND cell tech - SLC is best, MLC 2nd, TLC 3rd and QLC 4th in reliability/longevity. Pricing corresponds; SLC based SSD devices are expensive, QLC cheap
• Over-provisioning - a larger over-provided pool of flash cells will improve reliability and reduce performance. Some SSDs let you reprogram the amount of over-provisioning via the firmware

there was another factor also, but I've forgotten it for now