Pi4 vs Pi3 for running browsers

On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 02:03:36 +0000 (UTC), bob prohaska declaimed the following:

Well, since the R-Pi 4 requires Buster, you've already got a divergence for purposes of comparison.

Not at all. I don't care if it's running Buster, Stretch or something else. I just want to know how the machines perform from a usability standpoint.

Indeed, if Buster is substantially better than Stretch in terms of performance, stability or available browsers that alone might justify either a new machine or a software update to the old one. I'm just mindful of the Pi3's limitation to 1 GB of RAM and USB 2.0 access to swap.

A Pi4's extra RAM and faster I/O are attractive in principle, but I'd like to know if they help in practice, especially if Buster is a 64 bit system with all its added overhead.

Thanks for replying,

bob prohaska

On 04/12/2019 04:37, bob prohaska wrote: []

In use the Pi-4 /feels/ noticeably faster, but I've not used it for Web browsing. Have you checked whether CPU or memory is the limit? Monitor both and see whether either is at 100%. On Windows, Firefox seems to use quite a lot of memory, so the 4 GB on the Pi-4 (option) might be a significant gain.

On a sunny day (Wed, 4 Dec 2019 02:03:36 +0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska wrote in :

Both chrome and firefox seem to be usable on Pi 4 here. IIRC I even watched youtube videos on it.

With 'usable' I mean better than my old core i5 laptop with an old version of seamoney :-)

I am using buster and 4GB RAM # uname -a Linux raspi95 4.19.75-v7l+ #1270 SMP Tue Sep 24 18:51:41 BST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux

The latest browser of course helps too.

Using Chromium the Pi4 feels slightly faster than the Pi3+, but most importantly due to the extra memory, it stays faster where as the Pi3+ hits a wall at some point when it has used all the memory. I've not had crashes on either.

Even with a fast USB3.1 stick or a USB to SATA and an SSD, once the 1GB Pi's run out of memory, and has to swap, it will almost freeze. If you are lucky it will unfreeze after 30s to 1m, and you can close some tabs, or restart the browser to free up memory.

If you are doing desktop stuff, the 4GB Pi4 is a very worthwhile upgrade. The Pi3+ is painful in comparison.

---druck

Disclaimer: I am not (yet) using a Pi 4, but here are one or two comments which I hope are relevent:

- if you get a Pi4, be sure to upodate it to the latest firmware release. This has been shown to reduce its operating temp (and power consumption?).

- browsers are surprisingly big and complex. ATM I have the current X86-64 Firefox running on an 8GB Lenovo T440 i5. It is using 35% of available memory and 0.6% of CPU - and its just sitting there doing nothing! Most of the memory (2.2GB) and CPU is being used by its Web Extensions process.

- you may want to see if PaleMoon has been ported to Raspbian - its an older Firefox clone. It uses slightly less memory and about half the CPU load imposed by the current Firefox.

On RPi4 4G in July.

Chromium browsing was ok apart from video.

Video was absolutely dire, unusable.

Chromium wasn't supporting gpu hardware acceleration.

I posted about it back on 5-6 July with the output of chrome://gpu

I have a 4GB Pi4 and I spent a bit of time playing with it as a desktop machine, mostly to see how the temperature behaved.

I've previously tried using Chromium to browse on a Pi 3B (3B+?), and found the experience painful to the point of giving up. The 3B is a nice little machine, but modern websites are so big and so heavily scripted that it can't really cope.

With the 4 I forgot I was using Pi rather than my normal desktop machine. It just worked. Whether that's down to the faster CPU or to having an almost sensible amount of RAM I don't know -- I haven't tried a 1GB Pi4. The 4GB Pi4 is certainly dramatically better than the Pi3.

The temperatures weren't too upsetting either, but better with a fanshim than without.

Hope that helps.

It does, considerably!

Thank you,

bob prohaska