[Discuss] Raspberry PI[4,5] as infrastructure?

[Kent Borg]

On 6/9/24 09:37, markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
> Would a stack of RPI5s, controlled by some sort of docker look-alike,
> perform better than a huge VMware server?

Depends upon what you are trying to do.

Arm chips are starting to make inroads into real server farms, because 
they offer more performance per watt than do Intel and AMD chips, and I 
suspect also because they can scale their power usage so well. But, 
though they are getting pretty fast, are still slower.

A lot of what makes for a good server is good packaging and powering of 
the hardware, and a Raspberry Pi is, pretty much by definition, just a 
board. A real cool board, but that doesn't make it a server.

Some different Arm-based hardware, packaged as a server, might be better 
for some purposes, but not for gross speed.


That said, I have a Pi 4 running as a personal e-mail server, with a 
powered hub, and two spinning little WD disks in raid 1, and so far it 
works great.

This machine *is* so much more powerful than what we used to call a 
"supercomputer", and it is plenty powerful for the load I put on it. But 
it is the slowest server hardware I have used in a long time.

The board itself I have in a decent metal case, but my collection of 
hardware is a kind of a puddle of stuff that sits there, and it 
certainly leaves a bit to be desired in robust packaging.

I *do* like that in my setup there are no damn fans to make noise nor to 
fail. (The Raspberry Pi 5 I find far less appealing because it pretty 
much requires a CPU fan.)


> Would they be more secure because they are
> physically separated.

Probably not.



-kb