8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
raspberrypi.org
raspberrypi.org
I find that its pretty difficult to use 4gb of ram on a pi practically, and its often bottlenecked by I/O. It might just be my SD card, but executing trivial commands sometimes takes forever and reminds me that I'm in a pi. I've heard ssds can improve speeds a lot, but you still cant boot off usb.
That's a game changer.
It was not available at launch for the Pi 4, but was released in beta firmware in late September, and is currently part of the critical firmware update.
It works well, allowing separate boot images for each individual Pi on your network.
Isn't that a natural capability with PXE implemented at the server keyed off the MAC address?
> It works well, allowing separate boot images for each individual Pi on your network.
could you elaborate a bit more on that?
If you’re netbooting without any sdcard installed, I’d suggest disabling sd polling.
Something you've always been able to do is to keep just the boot partition on a small SD card and the root on whatever USB device you like. And yes, even with the supposedly best-performing SD cards, they easily become a problem both with performance and failure.
IITC that is still not officially supported (as a beta-test feature?), though many report it works as intended.
In the meantime if people don't want to use a beta feature the boot-from-SD-mount-root-elsewhere option works well too. You could also run it of an NFS share instead of a USB stick, though the performance metrics will differ.
Having just spent a bit north of $1k on a new CPU, RAM, and mobo for my desktop, I'm having a bit of sticker shock (in a good way) at how low these RPi prices are.
Doesn't look as flashy as the Flirc case, but cooling performance is supposed to be similar and you can access all the pins.
I have several pi in flirc cases, one is a pihole and one runs CI jobs (slowly) for PhotoStructure, and they don't get too hot even under sustained cpu load.
Flirc cases are great.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/ICE-Tower-CPU-Cooling-Fan-for-Ra...
I had a passive aluminum block heat spreader on it, and that works if you have good thermal bonding, unless you are really working it for a long duration. The problem is, if you hammer it long enough to throttle, that same mass takes a long time to cool back down.
The fan shim on a naked card just seems to work.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/aluminium-heatsink-case-f...
Technically there’s a very interesting “hybrid” abi you can try - 32 bit pointers on a 64 bit ISA. The main benefit is the extra registers that get unlocked in 64-bit mode while keeping memory usage lower. It seems there’s an attempt to do this in Debian [1]. From what I read it’s not a big win for arm though but could be big for x86 - since the ISA is very different between x86 and x86_64. Probably doesn’t matter when ram is so cheap nowadays.
Separately I’ve now got a serious case of buyers remorse. I just bought the 4gb version last week. I would have easily shelled out an extra $20 for double the ram.
https://medium.com/@matteocroce/why-you-should-run-a-64-bit-...
Linux x32 ABI, the free 5-8% performance upgrade!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw-ravkg67k&
From René Rebe of T2-SDE pre-Gentoo source-based Linux distro fame.
I occassionally watch it, and the website is deceptive because the latest builds are much newer than the website suggests.
At 8 GiB RAM, allowing a single process to "only" use half of the available RAM really doesn't seem too limiting for most workflows. Especially considering that there's 4 CPU cores. If it's a notable hassle-free performance improvement it seems like a no-brainer for most use cases.
On ARM, there are patches implementing ILP32 with an A64 ISA (AArch64 mode and registers). While there probably is an improvement over the A32/T32 ISA, the benefit is not that great since the 32-bit ARM architecture already had 14 general purpose registers (AArch64 has 30).
The reason the arm64 ILP32 hasn't made it into mainline Linux is not fully justifying the software porting/maintenance cost over the benefit it brings. Full 64-bit software stack is in general a better option unless you run in a very constraint environment but, in that case, an M-class ARM CPU is probably a better option anyway.
All other SBCs in this market segments have also been capped at 4GB - I'm hopeful about this leading to larger memory options from other vendors as well before long.
Great of RPi to keep pushing the envelope.
Interesting as Samsung developed a 8GB LPDDR4 memory chip back in 2013 - https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-industrys-f...
Looking at Micron (who probably tickd the box on price to make this happen), they can do 16Gb modules. So that may well happen. However the power aspect as already indicated from the 4Gb to 8Gb, considerations will prove more interesting.
Biggest gain though is more focus upon 64bit, which goes hand in hand with that extra memory.
You have to wonder why they deviated from what I thought was a universal custom.
The confusion comes when you blur the distinction between chips and modules as they do in mobile. They either use single package modules created from multiple chips via 3D die stacking or they use single chip modules.
The custom of using bytes only applies when specifying higher-level computer components.
I've been turned off from investing in a new laptop for a variety of reasons:
- Apple has made questionable hardware design decisions lately. If Louis Rossmann is to be believed, the T2 chip + secureboot situation is just as bad as the old keyboard situation. It sucks having no say over the hardware.
- Apple's newest Catalina OS has been strangely unstable for many (including me) and is headed in a strange direction. It sucks having no say over the software.
- Intel's chip vulnerabilities are too many and too confusing to keep track of. While their chips are advertised as "Quad core @ 2.4Ghz", I wonder what the actual performance is when all the kernel protections are enabled.
- AMD's Ryzen 4000 products look amazing, but (almost?) none of the laptops are 13" with high quality screens.
A "laptop" composed of 8GB Rpi + NexDock would allow me much greater control of the hardware and software.
If the raspberry pi meets your needs, consider a much cheaper laptop
Between Apple's missteps, Intel's not ideal products/roadmap, and AMD's lack of uptake, the current products do not seem to offer the value for their costs.
The 2015 13" rMBP was by far my most favorite laptop I have ever owned. I have never regretted spending what I did on that machine.
If a Raspi + Nexdoc costs $300, I'm not going to be very broken up over replacing it in a year or two. I cannot say the same for a $1000-2000 laptop.
Since 2015s doesn't have the T2 nonsense and you were fine with linux on the rpi and there's no T2 stopping you, then you can just wipe it and install what you want.
And no screwing around.
His claims were significantly overblown. If your T2 dies, yeah, your data is toast, because the disk keys live in the T2. But the same applies for your SSD dying itself, and the T2 is not especially or uniquely unreliable. Even if it dies as frequently as an SSD, the failure rate is still well within the realm of normal/acceptable. He’s blowing it up for clicks.
The keyboard on the other hand was a documented design flaw. The T2 works fine.
It also significantly improves platform speed and security (and they even left a platform security escape hatch if you want to disable the boot security and run Linux, something they didn’t have to do).
His post was inflammatory clickbait, nothing more. This sort of Apple-flaming, choir-preaching basher content has been extremely popular regardless of merit since long before the T2 or even the removal of the headphone jack from the phones.
Maybe the failure rate is fine, maybe it's not. All we know right now is that they added an additional single point of failure. The _very best case scneario_ for Apple is that they understood they were adding a single point of failure, ran the math to find what the increased expected failure rate would be (basic statistics say they definitionally raised it), and decided they didn't give enough fucks to do anything differently.
I'm perfectly fine with with a person who frequently deals with the people experiencing that failure doing some old fashioned New York shittalking towards that design decision.
Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I can just pick the second option. This is like digging up an old comment and saying "it's like when you were wrong that time".
> All we know right now is that they added an additional single point of failure.
Do we know that? TPM and encryption are also single points of failure, for your data at least. Apple didn't add that to increase the failure rate, they added it to have more control and to offer features that differentiate them from most other OEMs using COTS components for this.
They did the same with phones, TouchID and FaceID, the secure enclave, things that gave Apple enough control to turn the iPhone into the gold standard for keeping your data secure on a phone. It stands to reason that they want to do the same on laptops.
Sure. I prefer to live in the possibility space of uncertainty. Until something comes along to reduce that uncertainty.
>TPM and encryption are also single points of failure, for your data at least
Indeed they are.
>Apple didn't add that to increase the failure rate,
That's never the goal, but every design decision shifts the likelihood of certain failure types up and down. As I said before, the best case scenario is that Apple ran the math/experimentation to quantity it and was happy with their balance of likelihood of various failures.
You can argue until you're blue in the face Apple chose well. That's fine, doesn't mean someone who is close to the pain of end users experiencing failure is acting in bad faith by disagreeing with you.
Your last paragraph is just an ends justify the engineering-means argument. I don't find those interesting anymore.
Since you didn't actually provide any evidence either way (and nobody did to my knowledge) it stands to reason that indeed your only point is to argue.
There's no reason to assume Apple introduced something like the T2 chip for any other reason than to offer genuinely useful features to users and profit from it. Genuine criticism should be based on more than "maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong". Otherwise it's just shilling. ...And losing an argument, whether you found it interesting or not.
Care to see how others read your "brilliant" maybe this, maybe that "argument"? All manufacturers should offer no features to have no point of failure. Any single addition to any product can only be another point that can fail. Thus it should be assumed by default that this must be the intention of every manufacturer. It even begs the conclusion that all of them are the same so singling one out is purely grudge based.
It does not take a genius to see how the cooling design is supposed to work. Him saying that fan is "for placebo effect" is certainly not fair.
Lenovo will release a x13 with ryzen 4000 later this year.
Check out the Xiaomi RedmiBook 13 (100% sRGB coverage).
The spec says it's supposed to have 90% NTSC coverage. I've had it calibrated with a colorimeter, which tells me it has the following properties:
* 89.0% DCI-P3 coverage
* 97.8% AdobeRGB coverage
Here's the graph of its gamut vs sRGB.[2] I edit a lot of photos (though never professionally), and honestly I would never edit on an sRGB screen. Plus, what about HDR video? It's becoming extremely common these days.
[1] http://www.yslcd.com.tw/docs/product/B173HW01%20V.4.pdf
[2] https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qmaq6553VxMazANuLiFh95aW6fA...
I did the photography and color grading for a published coffee table book on a monitor with less than 97% AdobeRGB. I would have liked a better monitor, but it worked out....Lightroom and Photoshop have nice tools to help.
If you're doing HDR video editing, get an HDR display. If you're doing professional video/picture editing, get one with a wide-gamut and good color accuracy. For most people, 100% sRGB will be pleasing and accurate for most purposes.
[1] http://www.panelook.com/B173HW01%20V4_AUO_17.3_LCM_overview_...
For sure, I grant that there are much much better panels these days. I would get something better if I was purchasing it today. But I would find it difficult to give up the wide gamut with all the work I do with photos (personal and travel photos).
The profile says the white point ΔE 2000 to daylight locus is 21.86. I don't understand exactly what this is, but I know it isn't very good. The viewing angles are indeed quite bad, though actually a bit better than most other TN panels I saw during that era.
My point wasn't that this was the best screen you could get, even at the time, just that an sRGB screen isn't impressive at all - Apple's MacBooks hit 100% sRGB in 2014 at the latest, going by one I profiled with my colorimeter. MacBook Pros have been at ~100% Display-P3 for years now, and HP has a laptop at 100% DCI-P3.
> For most people, 100% sRGB will be pleasing and accurate for most purposes.
I just don't know that this is true. HDR video is becoming a bigger and bigger thing. Image codecs that support 10 bit+ color depth are becoming widespread; the iPhone takes photos with HEIC by default. I assume that eventually consumers are going to want to be able to view movies in HDR on their laptops, if we aren't there already.
(And yes, sure go get a laptop with 100% DCI-P3, HDR 600, etc. I'll wait...)
how do you plan to power the Pi? seems this would more be a 'portable' than a 'laptop'
Also - there is the 'pi top' kit if that suits your fancy.
If that’s all you want try an iPad2. I think it would make a better “laptop” than a RPI. RPI doesn’t have a battery.
Its fantastic automated tool however; and the live interface is great for irregular checks
With a phone processor it will still be ARM, you won't get a great laptop. But it already costs $250, for that price you can get an entry-level laptop that will probably perform in a similar way while still leaving your phone independent.
(2) The ARM in your phone is probably faster than a $250 laptop CPU. It can be plenty fine for most tasks.
(3) Many of us aren't CPU-bound in the first place. The only thing holding our phones back are software, keyboard, and display.
Done well, it'd be awesome. I definitely want something like the NexDock. However, I'll probably wait for V2 or V3. I think V1 will be good for people who would use it like a Chromebook.
My V5 NexDock would look like an actual dock, and plug my phone into:
* a pair of 4k monitors
* a keyboard, a mouse
* a pair of external HDDs (keeping my data backed up in RAID, and holding larger files)
And have good software / application support.
And then there's the cooling and power consumption difference between a 10 year old system and a RPi. It's not even close.
Like this kind of stuff: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Lenovo-Intel-i3-Dual-Core-i5-Q...
Is plentiful and easy to buy, again - ships anywhere in the EU.
As for the power consumption - I have to disagree again, I have an SFF like this and in idle it uses about 10W of power, 40W under load.
Rpi4 4GB uses 1-3W in idle, and up to 15W under full load. Yes, the numbers for the Pi are lower, but I wouldn't say "it's not even close". It's close enough that I would absolutely consider getting the larger PC instead.
Our used cars go for peanuts compared to used cars in the mainland for example.
I am often trawling the UK ebay for tech stuff because it's so much cheaper than Blocket (a craigslist-like) here in Sweden.
PS: very very pedantically and technically, UK isn't an EU member any longer. Although there is some limbo period.
I was somewhat intrigued by the use of the term mainland, but it certainly has some debate behind it: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3652/how-to-refe...
Yes second hand cars in the UK are cheaper, factors being that there has been a consumer rise for a while, seeing more second hand cars. This with the island effect makes for dispersal of those second hand goods more curtailed and for example you may be able to get cheaper cars in Germany second hand if the geography curtailed those easily shifting to nearby countries who have had less of a consumer drive.
Which is why my friend in Bulgaria will buy a second hand car in the UK, drive it back, sell it for twice what he paid for it. Then in Bulgaria Walnut wood is about 1/5th of the price of what it demands in the UK. But most opportunities in life are going the extra mile.
Yes UK is still technically an EU member during the transition period. How exporting/importing of cars pans out, well as long as the we don't end up with trade loop-holes - then I'll be happy and by that. Say EU has import tax of 30% on UK cars, new or second hand. Yet no such taxes for imports from say canada. Then the UK has no tax import on cars from UK to canada, so would be possible to export to Europe, via Canada to skirt such import taxes. That kinda thing worries me as environmentally, not good. But could happen.
All I do know though is that the current trade negotiations seem like a Monty Python playbook:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK0cUv3ba-o
something to do with steering wheel being on wrong site making them useless to all of EU other than for parts.
I believe it stems from a tradition of not disposing of things, and instead selling them on (via "car boot" sales) or handing them down. I believe (and this is pure conjecture) that it's a recent thing for brits to dispose of things with such frivolity, and this is somewhat echoed in the car-boot sales of late being chock-full of brand new mostly chinese cheap crap.
And maybe if you have an overabundance of second-hand goods then maybe the price goes down as all of the friction to sell even things considered "tat" are gone.
And most of the things we would consider "tat" are not "tat" to everyone else, for instance, I bought my first computers for 5gbp from a boot-sale, for such a token amount of money it is likely a person would not have sold it another way. Thus, I get a cheaper computer than I would have had to pay otherwise.
For $85 I can only find core2duo/quad 4gb RAM and spinning rust so there's no way that is a viable alternative for a RPi.
Maybe UK is an outlier or Austria is, I don't know.
The snide comments like the GP's are due to them living in the american bubble.
EDIT: also note the comment you're replying to is using a traditional workstation "slab" as an example. I'd rather use a small RPi that frees up more desk space than buy something that will make my work environment at home even more cramped!
Are you looking for broken screens? If not, $200 sounds reasonable enough to me.
The PI kicks ass if you want to play with hardware and actually use it's pins to build robots or whatever, or you want to use it's amazing camera and libraries. For pure compute its not a great deal.
Curious - any thoughts on why?
Same way hard drives a few years back increased in price, supply and demand as a factory went out of action for a while, curtailing market supply. Also why external USB drives became source of HD's as they had a larger supply buffer as less popular at the time and more in warehouses/stores.
I am free to buy and sell to and from any country in the world, the issues is not everyone is willing to deal and pay for international shipping which ends up quite high for a cheap SFF tower system.
In principle, shouldn't one of the consequences of the EU project be that intra-EU shipping rates should, for the same distance, be identical between within the same country and between EU countries? (Of course, I realise that outcome may not yet have actually been achieved in practice.)
One would hope that if they are successful in improving those transport links, shipping costs will reduce as a result.
For desktops, it shouldn't really matter. One quite likely already has a spare USB keyboard with the right layout, and if one doesn't, it shouldn't cost much to buy one (whether new or second-hand).
Big markets like US, UK and Germany have low prices on consumer products and in small markets like Austria and BeNeLux countries consumer products cost more.
Also I would much rather do technical support for Pi, than some old junk in questionable state of disrepair.
Generally though it is like a "full computer" so I don't know what I would buy one of these for, I currently have 3 Pis that have been on for a few years now continuously they're running web servers/automated tasks mostly Pi Zeros and a 3B+.
I think it's crazy 8GB is becoming like the new 4GB... 32GB is almost not enough personally.
And the used market is great. My favorite for a very small desktop are the Lenovo USFF devices like the M92P, M93P, etc. You have to search a bit, but you can find 8GB models with an i3/i5, small SSD, and Windows 10 for $110 or so on eBay.
Not as small as a Rpi, but pretty compact: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0036/4806/1509/products/m0...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is6qQujk6uU
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was also silently working on it.
The lack of suitable USB driver for the USB A ports is the main holdup to any reasonably usable setup (with varying workarounds which each have their own limitations) followed by the GPU driver - neither are easily fixed unfortunately.
With the right PiHAT this makes raid FS much nicer.
It's just for kicks; I wanted a little AI daydreaming on my desk :) Also to see if it was even possible, given how large the BigGAN model is. But lo and behold the 4GB Pi is _just_ enough to run it. I'm half tempted to buy this new 8GB version so I can run at higher resolutions ... but I think the precompiled Tensorflow package for RasPi is 32-bit anyway so might not matter.
Here she is: https://i.imgur.com/i22METZ.jpg
If you have an application you'd like to ship on a Raspberry Pi image, especially if you want to address all 8 GiB from a single process, check out Buildroot.
Once any of those requirements is loosened the other options start to look way better. So if you want a low power ARM computer and aren't concerned with the size as much, you can always get an old used Chromebook instead - which is well worth the money, but only IF you need any of the extra stuff it comes with (monitor/keyboard/mouse/battery/storage/camera/etc etc...). If you just want raw compute, then you can just buy an old x86 box like you say, but that will cost you in power and size.
I think some people just like to tinker on these little gizmos specifically, though. You read blog posts about running Kubernetes on Pis, and the immediate question is "why would you do that rather than just virtualizing stuff on an old x86 box?" The answer is really just "well, it's fun to work with little computers" which is presumably a factor for a lot of people.
[0] https://store.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board...
However, if price is the #1 concern, it's tough to beat the RPI. I checked Amazon and the cheapest 8GB RAM laptop was $239. Or maybe a used one on eBay for ~$175.
But overall this announcement is very impressive. I foresee the SBC "arms race" heating up. I bought a Jetson Nano thinking it was overkill, but it seems the bar keeps going up...
Got myself a RPi4 last month.
I'll give you folks a heads up next time I'm buying a Raspberry, seems like I can turn my luck into others fortunes.
- Rasbian will be renamed to Rasberry Pi OS
- They're adding a 64-bit variant in addition to the existing 32-bit
Something like the profile of the original Ubiquiti CloudKey would be ideal (don't need most of the ports on the Pi)
A carrier board for Compute Module with just POE / ethernet, USB ports and and SD card slot would be good enough too
I literally want same form factor as the Ubiquiti board but with open source support, and sufficient power to charge a phone from the USB port
Orange Pi Zero is along the right lines but doesn't have enough RAM for my needs and I'm unsure about the processor
Basically want something like https://fccid.io/SWX-UCCK/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-36...
I network / POE port, 1 or 2 USB sockets to plug a phone into, SD-Card slot, 1GB+ RAM, A53 (or above) processor
But 256MB limitation is killing me. Other was Wifi performance and reliability (for non LTS version).
This is really exciting, Pi 4 8GB with support for booting from USB SSD makes a cheap workstation option, many other possibilities as well as server in the garage to replace some VPS in cloud? (for general purpose workloads, can the CPU keep up if 8GB memory is saturated, consider general purpose use cases, memory-bound workloads may work well).
Side note: My original Pi 1 is still running Pi-Hole 5.0 fronted by nginx + php-fpm on Raspbian 10, working well for the home LAN ;-)
This plus the pinebook pro, I really hope that it will help the software availability on armv8 to skyrocket!
Also I really hope that someone will come with a new case to use it as tablet and laptop. Like a mix between the old pi-top and a surface book (or a PineTab).
If anyone has experience developing on the raspberry pi 4 (4GB), I really want to hear from you, especially regarding the processor performance.
I've been developing on the platform for a few months now. Though it's difficult to compare performance between architectures, the new BCM2711 compares favorably in CPU bound tasks to Intel's Cherry Trail Atoms from early 2016, primarily the Atom x5-z8350.
The Pi 4 also overclocks easily from 1.5 GHz to 2.0 - 2.1 GHz, where it exceeds Atom performance in some cases. The A72 cores are a huge leap in performance compared to the A53 cores of the RPi 3. These are architecturally "big" cores, as compared to the more power efficient and lower throughput "little" A53 cores of the previous model.
EDIT: I haste to add that having the full 64-bit Ubuntu 20.04 was what made this interesting to me.
Talking about the IO, did you experience failure (lose of work) due to the unreliability of microSD?
I know that it may improve in the future, but as of today, 2GB of Ram for the PineTab...
Moreover, I disagree with your suggestion that 2GB is useless in a tablet. It really depends on the use-case, and I have rarely seen a capability range similar to the pineTab in a tablet from-factor.
Have a look at the RockPro64, for instance: https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/
The 4GB version is about $80, but offers PCIe 4x, 128Mbit Flash, Gigabit Ethernet, USB-C Host With Video Out, and an eDP Port, among others.
It's true that the A64 family only goes up to 2GB, but the rock64 family goes to 4GB for $45. All offer valid tradeoffs to the Pi family :)
I think they technically go up to 3GB, but making a board with that is messy.
Are there are any SBCs that would have suitable IO for this? The pi4 has USB 3 which internally is connected via PCIe, but the question is whether it could handle eg SATA and Ethernet on it. Not that I actually need this for anything, it would just be cool to have a small case with 1TB SSD that you can plug into a switch and deliver hundreds of MB/s. With 8GB RAM you could even make good use of the fs cache, depending on usage pattern.
In fact, I have never gotten 10Gbps out of any software-only path. Routers can do it, but it's hardware accelerated and won't generate packets at that speed. I did recently get 7Gbps out of normal Internet usage, though, with a consumer-grade 10Gbps NIC on an Intel system. Pretty decent, but not 10Gbps.
Much optimization is necessary to make 10Gbps a thing. It's not a focus for $35 single-board computers. Those things are just obsolete phone chipsets in a desktop form factor; don't expect much out of them.
In general, saturating 10gbit on any x86 from the past couple years isn't a problem. Doing it with a single TCP connection is a bit tricky and requires some tweaking, and jumbo frames help too, but a simple threaded server pushing out data via sendfile to multiple clients easily gets the job done.
But yes, I agree that this is not a useful use case for SBCs, one of these things I'd just want to build because I can, not because I should.
Yeah,
Are there any SBC with an off-CPU networking fibre/module?
What I am building are LTE enabled ethernet bridges.
The closest fits that I have found are router boards but most of them don't come with mini PCIe ports that I can connect LTE modems to.
There are a few proprietary router boards but I was thinking there could be other options - you would likely know!
I am also interested so here's what I have found:
We want a SBC with an off-CPU networking module.
You don't want to tie up the CPU shuffling data bits for networking - there are now cheap and dedicated modules for that.
Most of what I have found are 1gbps Broadcom modules.
My issue is that the closest fits that I have found are router boards.
Please reach out if you can, would love to solve this myself.
I've been reading a lot about tiny websites on HN (e.g. https://bearblog.dev). Can we use these Raspberry Pis to host them? Are they performant enough? Is setting things up newbie-friendly?
Having your own little corner on the internet that no one can shut down sounds pretty cool.
As for setting things up, if you can apt-get install apache on any generic Linux box, you can do it on a Raspberry Pi.
The website is https://www.piwheels.org - it's a Python package repository for Raspberry Pi users
It's served over 20M downloads, which is 70TB. Currently serving 1.2M downloads a month (4.4TB).
A cheap VPS would be easier, better and about the same price. But piwheels is a bit of a dogfooding project. But it works!
Eventually I moved my sites to a VPS out of convenience. My ISP can't guarantee a static address with my current plan (although I've found it is static in practice so far), and the additional cost of a plan where they can exceeds the cost of renting a VPS.
If you have an ever changing dynamic IP allocation, you can still use Dynamic DNS services to update DNS records. I use GoDaddy for my names and AFAIR they provide this service, but there are also free providers that'll give you a subdomain, like https://dyndns.org. This requires some additional setup, because you need to update your IP with the dynamic DNS API regularly, for example via a cron job.
As for setup, if all you need is static pages you can use Raspbian and just install Apache or Nginx, put your files under /var/www/html and on your router forward some port to port 80 on your Raspberry Pi.
If your DNS provider has a CLI just use that. I use Route53 and a simple cronjob to update it.
Nginx? Apache? Cloudflare?
Would be nice if the Raspberry Pi kit comes with IKEA-level instructions to do this as weekend project.
I think another limiting factor to look at is your upload bandwith. If it's too low, then it will saturate and your conection will be very slow. Some ISP provide asymetric bandwith (much higher download than upload), so that's not the best case. If you have fiber, then you're absolutely good to go.
If your blog is featured on HN first-page, then it certainly won't handle the load with a RPI. But for most blogs, it should be enough.
Running ab on the Pi itself, the CPUs can deliver over 3k rps though of course the network subsystem is an important part of the story.
But if you want to learn about hosting (web servers, static routing, linux), then DIY. Using at least 2 GB RAM makes life easier.
His name was Boris and he was the company’s MVP for several years running :)
1. What was the highest uptime Boris pulled off?
2. Why did you have to decommission him? Was there an eventual hardware failure?
Thanks!
Sitting behind a free CloudFlare account mitigates a lot of bandwidth usage too.
Which is a ridiculous waste of energy... :( you notice it too now using Microsoft Teams (Electron) and Google Meet versus Facetime. Eats your battery in no time.
On my Intel NUC, which is a few years old, I have to use an extension[1] which forces YouTube to serve h264. Otherwise it's a loud laggy mess.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
To give a rough idea, that 8GB chip is the same kind that's used in the 256GB DDR4 modules (2x8 chips per side, 2 sides).
There is no Linux like solution for android phone that runs Xserver and OpenJDK reliably. Samsung DEX emulation was the only usable solution, but that was killed off. Termux can not run OpenJDK, some weird issues with crashing.
Also most devices do not have enough cooling capacity, max performance can be only delivered in short bursts before CPU gets throttled down. If you hack it to run at full speed for hours, it freezes.
PI is simply the only option at this size, with enough CPU power and good Linux support.
When you want Xserver, you just do so from Android vnc viewer to 127.0.0.1:5901 or so.