Raspberry Pi 4 performance

[Carlton Banks]

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.

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.

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[fillippone]

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.

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 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.

[DaveF]

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.

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

[philipma1957]

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.

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

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.

[pereira4]

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.

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.

[Jbnp]

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 

[fillippone]

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.

[Jbnp]

@Jbnp could you share few information such as RAM, CPU and Disk usage? I plan to buy one soon.

P.S. i wonder the CPU temperature during sync process.

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.

[TheBeardedBaby]

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.

[fillippone]

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.

[Jbnp]

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.

[fillippone]

We indeed need cool cases.

Sorry, couldn't resist a silly comment.

[Jbnp]

Will try to order one or both of these 'cool'  cases from china. There are also options with fans but I really prefer passive cooling for something that is intended for 24/7 use.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000056606252.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000095452880.html

[Carlton Banks]

There's plenty of bandwidth to the external SSD through the super-speed USB connection. Also the gigabit LAN is no bottleneck.

other performance bottlenecks are:

• the dbcache setting. With 4GB RAM, setting this to 1GB (i.e. dbcache=1024) should be fine
• Despite all the RAM, setup a new swapfile (2-4GB) on the SSD, then after turning that new swapfile on, turn off the old swapfile on the slow SD card
• Use bitcoin 0.18.0+ to get better block processing performance (0.18.0 had a double digit performance increase in the database handling code)

[DaveF]

There's plenty of bandwidth to the external SSD through the super-speed USB connection. Also the gigabit LAN is no bottleneck.

Yes, so long as you don't use a crap drive or one that is using a crap USB -> SATA chip.

I work on too much low end hardware, and some of the cost cutting things are really irksome.

Some of the newer low end external SSDs have worse performance then an older spinning drive.

Will try to order one or both of these 'cool'  cases from china. There are also options with fans but I really prefer passive cooling for something that is intended for 24/7 use.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000056606252.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000095452880.html

Make sure that there is actual contact between the case and CPU in the proper area. Cheap cases suck.
Just scrapped a bunch of aluminum cases for the RPi3 that had enough space between the heatsinnk that was part of the case and the CPU itself that the thermal pad I put on the CPU was untouched on top

-Dave

[Jbnp]

There's also a great overview on cases/cooling here: https://www.martinrowan.co.uk/2019/09/raspberry-pi-4-cases-temperature-and-cpu-throttling-under-load/

Passive cooling i.e. natural convection does indeed require a really huge heatsink compared to forced air-flow cooling. To be effective you basically need the entire case to be a heatsink.

If you have the data it is fairly easy to calculate the temperature rise of a heatsink given the required power dissipation. Or at least getting a rough estimate.
It might be difficult finding data for a Chinese raspberry case, but let's say we want a heatsink to be 30C above ambient then you would need one with a thermal resistance of 3 degree C per watt at natural convection.
A random example of a heatsink specified for 3 C/W @ natural (not suitable for RPI but just to provide a hint about size) : https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/wakefield-vette/401K/345-1048-ND/340344
On top of this comes the thermal resistance in the interface between the chip and the heatsink, which adds to the temperature rise of the silicon. On the other hand, a lot of the power dissipation is caused by other chips on the RPI board than the CPU.
Sorry for blabbering. Just happened to be an electrical engineer doing stuff like that for a living 

Btw. I've plugged the RPI to my own LAN. It's sync'ing much faster again. Should be done sometime tomorrow :-)

[DaveF]

Did the sync ever finish OK?
Also wondering if you ordered the cases or are doing anything else with the cooling. I'm still kicking around ideas for mine, none look great.

-Dave

[Jbnp]

Did the sync ever finish OK?

Yes it finished. Not without problems though 

I naively thought the blockchain would still just fit on my 250GB SDD but turned out I was about 20 gig short.
Then I moved the data to a larger 5400 rpm HDD which of course is awfully slow at sync'ing.

Then then project turned into a filesystem experiment. I re-formatted the 250GB SSD to a btrfs filesystem with zlib compression enabled and copied the blockchain back.
Even though the blockchain is poorly compressible it still compresses to about 80% i.e. freeing up sufficient space with some 10GB to spare after sync'ing was done.
Naturally, the compressed SSD is also significantly slower than uncompressed it is still much faster than the HDD. I guess I just need to order a new disk..

Now I'm fiddling around with raspiblitz to get some hands-on with lightning 

I ordered one of those china aluminium boxes - will see how it fits and whether the thermal interface can be done properly. But as mentioned, it is not really a huge problem. It will throttle down if it gets too hot and normally it won't even get that hot when just staying in sync.

[fillippone]

Very interested in temperature and eventual thermal throttling.
Heard of many instances of thermal throttling of R4 just being sitting idle (probably due to very poor air circulation/high ambient temp).

Very interesting thread here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=243500&sid=6c9afc7c1a072ffb808168ebaa95a7ea&start=525#p1536192



Wondering if just running bitcoind + LN hit the 80 C° threshold.

[pereira4]

Did the sync ever finish OK?

Yes it finished. Not without problems though 

I naively thought the blockchain would still just fit on my 250GB SDD but turned out I was about 20 gig short.
Then I moved the data to a larger 5400 rpm HDD which of course is awfully slow at sync'ing.

Then then project turned into a filesystem experiment. I re-formatted the 250GB SSD to a btrfs filesystem with zlib compression enabled and copied the blockchain back.
Even though the blockchain is poorly compressible it still compresses to about 80% i.e. freeing up sufficient space with some 10GB to spare after sync'ing was done.
Naturally, the compressed SSD is also significantly slower than uncompressed it is still much faster than the HDD. I guess I just need to order a new disk..

Now I'm fiddling around with raspiblitz to get some hands-on with lightning 

I ordered one of those china aluminium boxes - will see how it fits and whether the thermal interface can be done properly. But as mentioned, it is not really a huge problem. It will throttle down if it gets too hot and normally it won't even get that hot when just staying in sync.

Can you mention how much time did it took to finish the sync? Does Bitcoin Core keep such a statistic? this would be interesting to have so you could keep track of it even if you close the device you are using. Just count the time it takes until you reach the first ever sync, this would be extremely useful for the database im doing. Right now im running a bunch of different devices and keeping track of it all with chronometers because as far as I know the client doesn't have anything built in to do this.

I wonder if there is a massive difference Linux vs Windows but that would be x2 the time it will take for this to finish... I think it's best to put this effort in Linux for now.