Which Raspberry Pi to use? Will more memory help at all?

[Christopher Kelley]

The problem with Pis being so inexpensive is, I've ended up with a few extras that I bought "just in case".  I've read the documentation, and while it's clear WeeWx will run fine on 1Gb (or 512Mb), I also have 2Gb and 4Gb Pi4s lying about.  

Is there any advantage to a 2Gb or 4Gb Pi4?  Not just "I've been running on 128Mb for years with no problems", but are there any advantages to having more memory, or would it be completely unused?  I might have the RPi running WeeWx also drive a small display, so there would be that overhead as well.

I've already got an external M.2. SATA SSD to boot/run from, so there's no worries on the storage / reliability end.

Thanks!

[Dave Webb KB1PVH]

The only thing it gets you is serving the webpage a little quicker. The Pi 4 runs hot so you'll want a fan on it if you do use one. I have a test setup running on a Pi zero and it works fine. 

Dave - KB1PVH




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[vince]

You do 'not' need a fan on a pi4 if you get a quality case like a FLIRC which passively cools through the case itself.  Works great.

[Christopher Kelley]

Yeah, I'm putting it in a Argon ONE M.2 case which has a built-fan.  From my experience, just setting a Pi4 on edge is usually enough so it can radiate from the top and bottom surfaces, but for this I want to give it a bit of protection from dust build-up.

With the firmware updates over the past year, the RPi4 is not as sensitive as it originally was.

[p q]

Do you expect much web traffic?

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Peter Quinn
(415)794-2264

[Bill Arthur]

I'm running WeeWx with two extensions, a radio program (aprx), a WiFi hotspot and about six other processes.
All of this uses 5 to 10% of the processing power of my Pi Zero W
I think you'll do just fine with a Pi 4.

[Les Niles]

I run weewx with the Belchertown skin and a couple of other skins, with a mysql database; there’s a local nginx instance running but the pages are uploaded to a hosted server that gets most of the traffic.  This configuration was tight on an RPi 1B+ with 512MB — every few months it would run out of memory and need a restart.  It runs fine on a 3B+ w/1GB.  

  -Les

[Christopher Kelley]

Okay, so probably no use to use a 2Gb or 4Gb Pi4, just unused memory.  

Thanks!

Christopher

[Christopher Kelley]

No, not at all.   Just trying to match the load to the right RPi.  I didn't know if there were memory structures or something in WeeWx that would benefit from more memory.

[galfert]

I think the Pi with 4 GB RAM makes the most sense. You never know what else you may want to throw at that Pi to do simultaneously with WeeWX. Maybe you want to run Cumulus MX at the same time. Or maybe something better comes along now that the Pi 4 B has been around for almost 2 years. Then if you have a Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM it can be more useful for a future project. The 8 GB version is a bit too much of a price premium for futureproofing. The 4 GB version is the sweet spot.

[michael.k...@gmx.at]

It depends. If you are using the PI as a "one for all" device for, weewx, home automation, media server, run several other services the pi4 with enough RAM makes sense. Otherwise I'd choose the PI with the least energy consumption. Running a PI4 24/7/365 for nothing more than weewx is wasting resources. Or maybe you are running a NAS that allows you to run weewx? Then you wouldn't need a pi at all.

[Garry A Lockyer]

For what’s it’s worth, I’m running WeeWX and Belchertown plus the mem extension and my RSS feeds extension (WXFeeds) on a Pi Zero W & Raspberry Pi OS Lite, with a Davis Vantage Pro 2 set to 5 minute logging and it all runs fine.  Well ok, it runs fine now that we know how to workaround a memory leak in the Cheetah generator, but that’s a whole other story.

My extension queries several endpoints and generates many HTML files including numerous (potentially hundreds!) Google Maps.  If all endpoints are enabled, index.html can be huge - close to 1MB.  This system is in Oliver BC.  All files are ftp’d to a web server that is located in Toronto ON.  And I’ve enabled remote logging to the same server.  Real time data via MQTT works as expected.

You can see the test system at lockyer.ca/weather/Area27Test (and memory usage graphs at Area27Test/mem.  This system will be moving to Area 27 (area27.ca) this Thursday, after which it will be available at lockyer.ca/weather/Area27.  Within a couple of weeks, a duplicate system will be at lockyer.ca/weather/JFKustoms. And, I will be implementing a couple of similar systems with WeatherFlow Tempests.  I suspect I will have to set the archive period of the Tempest systems to at least 120 seconds to allow all per archive processing to complete in one period.

Bottom Line: I wouldn’t hesitate to use WeeWX on a Pi Zero W for a stand-alone weather station.

Regards,

Garry Lockyer

C: +1.250.689.0686

E: Ga...@Lockyer.ca

On Mar 8, 2021, at 23:01, michael.k...@gmx.at <michael.k...@gmx.at> wrote:

It depends. If you are using the PI as a "one for all" device for, weewx, home automation, media server, run several other services the pi4 with enough RAM makes sense. Otherwise I'd choose the PI with the least energy consumption. Running a PI4 24/7/365 for nothing more than weewx is wasting resources. Or maybe you are running a NAS that allows you to run weewx? Then you wouldn't need a pi at all.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-user/859be099-4c40-4c5d-b977-93fa15108cd9n%40googlegroups.com.