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A cluster of six Raspberry Pi 2s running Drupal (a PHP CMS) is about 20% slower than a single i7 laptop with an SSD for general usage, and can be _much_ slower
by geerlingguy 11y ago
A cluster of six Raspberry Pi 2s running Drupal (a PHP CMS) is about 20% slower than a single i7 laptop with an SSD for general usage, and can be _much_ slower if your usage requires lots of disk or network I/O.
The 4-core ARMv7 chip in the Pi 2 is way faster than the chip in previous Pis, but it's not a speed demon by any means. And the network I/O (and all I/O) being tied down to a slowish USB 2.0 bus means you're limited to ~90 Mbps through LAN, or ~200 Mbps if you use a USB 3.0 network adapter.
Even trying a fast SSD plugged into one of the USB ports (rather than a comparatively slow 'Extreme Pro' microSD card), you won't get a huge performance boost because of limited I/O bandwidth.
See many, many more benchmarks on this wiki: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-dramble/wiki https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-dramble/wiki
P.S. I have a cluster of six Pi 2s running http://www.pidramble.com/ http://www.pidramble.com/, and I'm actually considering moving more of my hobby/very-low-traffic sites over to it, since it's a sunk cost of $400 whereas many of these small sites are currently on $5 or $10/month servers.
- kiddico 11y agoWhat's this about using a USB 3 ethernet adapter? Does the RPI have usb 3 ports? If so I've been missing out...
- geerlingguy 11y agoNo, but you can only buy USB 3.0 adapters with gigabit ratings (all the USB 2.0 adapters max out at 10/100). See: http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/getting-gigabit-networking http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/getting-gig...
- Sanddancer 11y agoThere are several USB 2.0 gigabit ethernet dongles out there. They'll obviously only reach a max of 480mbit/sec, but so will the 3.0s on a 2.0 bus.
- rasz_pl 11y ago>about 20% slower than a single i7 laptop this number seems too low, hmm ah, you mean the 'funny' 1.7GHz i7 >or ~200 Mbps if you use a USB 3.0 network adapter how is usb 3.0 going to help usb 2.0 pee? I think you meant GigE usb adapter, but looking at your tests even that merely got close to wired 100mbit speed :( >sunk cost of $400 coincidentally thats the cost of a used i7 laptop :) or a purpose build home server All in all such cluster is a cool hobby/learning project, but I wouldnt run anything serious on it.