Raspberry Pi 4 performance

[Jbnp]

Can you mention how much time did it took to finish the sync?

I can't say for sure as I had some troubles with the last part of the sync and did some experiments etc. But at least, the first half of the blockchain (i.e. +100GB) was downloaded within the first day.
With optimum conditions (fast network and SSD drive) I believe a  clean sync should easily complete within two days on the RPI4B.

I now also got raspiblitz (Bitcoin + LND) up and running :-)
With the small passive heatsink temperature settles at about 68C with some open connections...


               RaspiBlitz v1.3  Blitz99
               bitcoin Fullnode + Lightning Network
        ,/     -------------------------------------------
      ,'/      CPU load 3.85, 3.75, 2.71, temp 68°C 154°F
    ,' /       Free Mem 3392M / 3906M  HDDuse 262G (95%)
  ,'  /_____,  ssh admin@192.168.0.164 d8.3MiB u25.8MiB
 .'____    ,'
      /  ,'    bitcoin v0.18.1 mainnet Sync OK 100.00%
     / ,'      Public xx.xxx.xxx.xx:8333 17 connections
    /,'
   /'          LND 0.7.1-beta wallet 0 sat (+400000)
               0/0 Channels 0 sat 4 peers

[pereira4]

Can you mention how much time did it took to finish the sync?

I can't say for sure as I had some troubles with the last part of the sync and did some experiments etc. But at least, the first half of the blockchain (i.e. +100GB) was downloaded within the first day.
With optimum conditions (fast network and SSD drive) I believe a  clean sync should easily complete within two days on the RPI4B.

I now also got raspiblitz (Bitcoin + LND) up and running :-)
With the small passive heatsink temperature settles at about 68C with some open connections...


               RaspiBlitz v1.3  Blitz99
               bitcoin Fullnode + Lightning Network
        ,/     -------------------------------------------
      ,'/      CPU load 3.85, 3.75, 2.71, temp 68°C 154°F
    ,' /       Free Mem 3392M / 3906M  HDDuse 262G (95%)
  ,'  /_____,  ssh admin@192.168.0.164 d8.3MiB u25.8MiB
 .'____    ,'
      /  ,'    bitcoin v0.18.1 mainnet Sync OK 100.00%
     / ,'      Public xx.xxx.xxx.xx:8333 17 connections
    /,'
   /'          LND 0.7.1-beta wallet 0 sat (+400000)
               0/0 Channels 0 sat 4 peers

I don't think you can extrapolate the remaining half of the blockchain by what amount of time it took to get the first half downloaded. Consider this:

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,all

Unfortunately there isn't older charts that collect this data that I know of, but by looking at that you can see the all time peaks of 2017 during the $20k bubble, that mix of legit traffic + Ver and Bitmain spamming makes that section of the blockchain specially slow to synch in my experience. Maybe it was because it's an HDD and you notice this section less with SSD. When I find some free time I will try for myself and monitor the full sync time and report back.

[Jbnp]

Make sure that there is actual contact between the case and CPU in the proper area. Cheap cases suck.

Received one of the cheap cases, the one with ribs. And as DaveF suspected, there were no contact between cpu and heatsink. There were about 1mm air gap 😕.
I cut a small piece of 1mm aluminum and fitted it with heatsink compound, which turned it into an ON OK solution 🙂.
Raspiblitz running at about 50C now.

Edit: Fixed typo.

[DaveF]

Make sure that there is actual contact between the case and CPU in the proper area. Cheap cases suck.

Received one of the cheap cases, the one with ribs. And as DaveF suspected, there were no contact between cpu and heatsink. There were about 1mm air gap 😕.
I cut a small piece of 1mm aluminum and fitted it with heatsink compound, which turned it into an ON solution 🙂.
Raspiblitz running at about 50C now.

What is the ambient around the case? Any real airflow? That's a 18C temp drop which is a fairly large percentage.

-Dave

[Jbnp]

What is the ambient around the case? Any real airflow? That's a 18C temp drop which is a fairly large percentage.

There's 22C ambient. No airflow but it's in 'the open' (i.e. unrestricted convection) in the corner of an office:
http://too-hot.dk/storage/temp/raspi_case.jpg
Showing 52C after a couple of hours - haven't seen it higher than that yet. Dropped to 51C after taking the image.

You can even tell I'm currently using a rotary disc on the thermal  image
http://too-hot.dk/storage/temp/thermal.jpg

I was expecting about 50C given a sizeable heatsink with good thermal interface. A bit of forced convection will really help, but I want a completely quiet solution and 50C is totally fine :-)

Oh, by the way. I removed the anodized surface of the area of the heatsink that evenually contact the cpu. Anodized aluminum is a really good insulator of both electricity and heat. Probably doesn't matter much at this relatively low thermal densitity though. But we recently had an issue at work with a heatsinks delivery that was inadvertently anodized at the contact area where we transfer in excess of 100W/cm2 from a power tranasistor. This caused an increase in die temperature of more than 10C so we had to rework those heatsinks by milling the surface.

[TheBeardedBaby]

Woo-hoo look what I just got in my mail today:


I want to play a bit with it first and later I'll move my full node to the Pi.
Have other projects on the way so I'll need to wait with the testing and benchmarking, but when that time comes I'll share my experience with you guys

Thanks to the Bitcoin I can play with my new toy, thanks Satoshi

[Jbnp]

Thanks to the Bitcoin I can play with my new toy, thanks Satoshi

Have fun playing :-)
I need to get a second one now that I allocated mine to run a bitcoin node 

[Jbnp]

What is the ambient around the case? Any real airflow? That's a 18C temp drop which is a fairly large percentage.

Tried leaving it running with 100% load on all cores (cpuburn-a53). It stabilizes at 71C after about an hour. Damn hot to the touch but no clock throttling.
If 100% load was a 24/7/365 thing, then I would definitely go with a fan but being an intermediate condition it is fine.

bitcoind and lnd doesn't even seem to mind the cpu being kept busy :-)

[fillippone]

I think you didn’t mentioned exactly the mode of the case.
Would you please tell us which “cheap China case” did you buy?
Would you recommend it, given you had to do so much DIY to make it operational?
Thanks!

[Jbnp]

Would you please tell us which “cheap China case” did you buy?
Would you recommend it, given you had to do so much DIY to make it operational?

It's this one https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000056606252.html
If you are comfortable adding a small piece of aluminum/copper in between the gap, then it's great. But if you like something that just works then stay away from it.
It's really odd those Chinese manufacturers don't check these kind of things before manufacturing by the thousands...

[DaveF]

Has anyone been having any issues with performance with the September 26 image?
I wiped both of mine for different reasons and downloaded the newest one and although I can't give any hard and fast numbers it just feels like there was a performance hit.
I am wondering if they did something to help with the heat issue.

No help on the RPi forums so I figured I would ask here.

Thanks,
Dave

[DaveF]

Has anyone been having any issues with performance with the September 26 image?
I wiped both of mine for different reasons and downloaded the newest one and although I can't give any hard and fast numbers it just feels like there was a performance hit.
I am wondering if they did something to help with the heat issue.

No help on the RPi forums so I figured I would ask here.

Thanks,
Dave

What kind of performance issue you're talking about? Very recently i bought Raspberry Pi 4, install Raspbian OS and perform all update (including sudo rpi-update) and i don't experience any performance problem.

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

[Ultra2SE213FanTC]

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!

[achow101]

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!

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.

[Carlton Banks]

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

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 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".

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'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

I was able to figure out that when my 256GB SanDisk card got full, it was able to restart when I -prune=550 !
[snip]
I might get a 512GB SanDisk next time that'll cover the blockchain data.  200GB is not really enough for Bitcoin blockchain data anymore!

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

[DaveF]

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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

[Carlton Banks]

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.

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.

Not sure where you got that idea from.

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....

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

.....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.

[fillippone]

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

Users setting custom dbcache values can increase their setting slightly without using any more real memory. Recent changes reduced the memory use by about 9% and made chainstate accounting more accurate (it was underestimating the use of memory before). For example, if you set a value of "450" before, you may now set a value of "500" to use about the same real amount of memory. (#16957)

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

[Carlton Banks]

Users setting custom dbcache values can increase their setting slightly without using any more real memory. Recent changes reduced the memory use by about 9% and made chainstate accounting more accurate (it was underestimating the use of memory before). For example, if you set a value of "450" before, you may now set a value of "500" to use about the same real amount of memory. (#16957)

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

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)

[TheBeardedBaby]

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?

[Mike Walters] on a Twitter post about this issue probed around with a HackRF and discovered a radio frequency issue. It turns out that at this screen resolution, the Pi 4 emits some RF noise which is exactly in the range of WiFi channel 1. It seems that the Pi 4 is acting as a WiFi jammer on itself.