Hi
I’ve been thinking about migrating my self hosted TTRSS instance to Raspberry Pie 4GB RAM and would like your input on performance result before buying one
As mention, Ive been self hosting for quite a while now (Debian/Postgresql/Nginx) on Home XEN server with a public vps as Reverse Nginx proxy for ssl and public facing purpose…
Currently This XEN server is dual xeon with 120 GB ram and on raid5 SSD drive.
Resource assign to current TTRSS VM instance is 4GB Ram / 4 Core / ± 32GB hdd / currently having 2695 feed with multiple filter logic.
This Server is getting old and power hungry and looking to save electricity cost and shutting this server down. Based on those spec, any member of this community can tell me if a PIE is a good choice ?
in my opinion you’re going to have a bad time. don’t even think of using microsd.
idk why people are so dead set on using these SBCs at tasks that are obviously a bad fit for them - e.g. an incredibly shitty high-latency NAS, an incredibly shitty router / firewall (at least newer ones don’t have phy on usb, i think), a very mediocre application server which can’t take any load and has zero iops storage, etc.
home automation, tinkering with GPIO, maybe running a lightweight daemon like nagios to monitor your other infrastructure, gathering some kind of sensor data, sure, i can understand that. but trying to make a general purpose server out of it (or, god forbid, a desktop), no.
depending on other tasks your server is running you probably don’t need all this power hungry hardware but replacing it with a bunch of SBCs is not what i would call a good idea.
I think this will depend on what database you choose. I found that MySQL/MariaDB is/was pretty CPU hungry. I was running 2 pis (web and a d/b) and overall it was ok but don’t expect the sort of performance you would get from better hardware.
I’m not just sure why one would do this when there are virtual servers available for just a few dollars a month. They’ll have substantially better performance, redundancy, etc. They’ll typically have a more stable Internet connection and the cost will probably be better from an electrical/utility perspective.
(Not to mention the option to throw things like OpenVPN on there as well. )
I have raspberry pi 4 used as a poor mans NAS. It’s a crap in terms of IOPS. Don’t use it for hosting tt-rss. I’m so sick of it’s crappy performance and I’m looking for some barebone/nuc PC as a replacement.
nuc is better but still no redundant storage of any kind, and imo overpriced for what it is.
here’s a “server” i have at home:
in win ms04-01 w/ sata backplate, 4 HDDs
HP P410 SAS hba i got from an old scrapped proliant at work (and flashed older firmware so it would work properly)
asus J3355I-C ITX passively cooled motherboard, 8GB ram.
i don’t run tt-rss on it (i have a vps for that) but it has some other stuff running like jellyfin, photoprism, a bunch more things in docker, and two virtual machines using kvm. it works alright.
Yeah, barebone/nuc prices are ludicrous but my main goal is to keep the power usage at minimal. Home server will definitely pull some watts when running 24/7. And for storage redundancy, I’m thinking about additional NAS box dedicated for backups/media. The barebone computer will be only a home lab server which will have backups on NAS
I configured a NAS with a Celeron J3455 because I wanted a machine being able to calculate RAID-5 parity without performance impact. Not that I measured that but it works.
I measured its wattage at about 30W when idle. I guess there’s still room for improvement but it’s not only doing NAS stuff but also Plex stuff and I intend to let it do PXE, DNS and DHCP stuff, too. BTW, tt-rss is not running on it as I want my tt-rss to have a stable internet connection.
I still had some 4GB SO-DIMMs lying around so I could just use those. I added a PCIe card for another few SATA ports. It also has eSATA ports so I could add another case with external HDDs for backing up the internal drives in regular intervals. Currently, I live the dangerous backup-less life.
But well, the important part of my comment is the wattage. It’s a few times higher than a RPi4. The lower boundary for my additional power costs is at about 80€.
i’ve definitely noticed performance improvement after switching from an mdadm mirror (not even RAID5) to a dedicated raid card, and P410 is a slow and ancient HBA.
then again even a basic LSI raid card like a 9240 would add about 130 euro to that build so i guess it’s not worth it.
i’m also running dm-crypt so maybe combining that with mdadm was a bit too much for that celeron. it worked but i could feel it struggling sometimes.
Build a NAS. I’ve used one based on the old AMD E350 CPU for years. 4 disks, mdadm mirrored pairs. Supports all the usual network and file sharing stuff, plus a media server and small mysql database. Frankly the mdadm overhead is negligible compared to the general slowness of spinning rust.
out of idle curiosity i copied my tt-rss docker install to the aforementioned home server/NAS. overall it seems to work a lot better than on my vps, even though it boasts two E5-2670 v2 cores & SSD. most likely because, unlike an overprovisioned VPS host, it’s not constantly starved for I/O.
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU J3355 @ 2.00GHz
this seems to be more than enough, at least for me.
