Hi all; a quick query about speeds. I currently use an old i386 machine as home server (everything from local NFS file-store, to bind, to email server). It's an acer aspire r3700, running at 1.8GHz, 2 proc/4 thread job. It runs freebsd headless, and I use vnc for day-to-day operations on it. I'm contemplating replacing with a rpi4, which I gather is now supported by freebsd, using a usb3 external hard drive. But is this likely to prove slower or problematic for any other reason? TIA for any thoughts. -- Mike Scott Harlow, England

Re: rpi4 as server? By: Mike Scott to All on Sat Nov 28 2020 11:33 am > Hi all; a quick query about speeds. > > I currently use an old i386 machine as home server (everything from > local NFS file-store, to bind, to email server). It's an acer aspire > r3700, running at 1.8GHz, 2 proc/4 thread job. It runs freebsd headless, > and I use vnc for day-to-day operations on it. > > I'm contemplating replacing with a rpi4, which I gather is now supported > by freebsd, using a usb3 external hard drive. But is this likely to > prove slower or problematic for any other reason? > > TIA for any thoughts. > > > -- > Mike Scott > Harlow, England The PIs are not great at I/O. They will do for a personal server with a couple of users, but it is not ideal as a server platform. II don'tknow about the newer PIs, but at least the early ones used an USB bus for the ethernet connection, which meant network I/O was limited from the start. -- gopher://

rpi4 as server?

Nov 28, 2020 83 Replies

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NY 5 years ago

Using a SAMBA share of a spinning USB HDD (ie not the SD card) on a Pi 3 or Pi 4, and copying a 1 GB video file to/from a Windows 7 PC over gigabit Ethernet, I get:

- 130 Mbps on Pi 3

- just under 1000 Mbps on Pi 4

Reading from Pi to Win saturates at a constant speed, writing from Win to Pi is more variable.

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alister 5 years ago

Ok I stand corrected on network performace. but that just simply confirms my main point that the data network is the major bottle neck not the server platform, so Pi performance is not critical & it will be easily up to the task in this setup.

Hacker's Guide To Cooking: 2 pkg. cream cheese (the mushy white stuff in silver wrappings that doesn't really come from Philadelphia after all; anyway, about 16 oz.) 1 tsp. vanilla extract (which is more alcohol than vanilla and pretty strong so this part you *GOTTA* measure) 1/4 cup sugar (but honey works fine too) 8 oz. Cool Whip (the fluffy stuff devoid of nutritional value that you can squirt all over your friends and lick off...) "Blend all together until creamy with no lumps." This is where you get to join(1) all the raw data in a big buffer and then filter it through merge(1m) with the -thick option, I mean, it starts out ultra lumpy and icky looking and you have to work hard to mix it. Try an electric beater if you have a cat(1) that can climb wall(1s) to lick it off the ceiling(3m). "Pour into a graham cracker crust..." Aha, the BUGS section at last. You just happened to have a GCC sitting around under /etc/food, right? If not, don't panic(8), merely crumble a rand(3m) handful of innocent GCs into a suitable tempfile and mix in some melted butter. "...and refrigerate for an hour." Leave the recipe's stdout in a fridge for 3.6E6 milliseconds while you work on cleaning up stderr, and by time out your cheesecake will be ready for stdin.

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The Natural Philosopher 5 years ago

With servers it is almost always the IO speed that dominates - disk IO or network IO - there is the square root of sweet fanny adam's amount of computing power done in serving files.

Only when you start to run things like e.g. centralised database apps does CPU performance get to be an issue, and only with a large amount of users does RAM get to be significant.

There?s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good. Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)

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Ahem A Rivet's Shot 5 years ago

Very true, unless of course you go for encrypted storage or the extreme compression techniques that are becoming popular for near-line archives.

Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

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