chromium

Testing how long it takes Chromium to open, load a web page, and quit on Debian

Something I've long been meaning to benchmark, but never really got around to, is benchmarking the amount of time it takes on a Raspberry Pi to open a browser, load a page, and quit.

This is a relatively decent thing to benchmark, compared to other raw performance metrics, because it's something that probably 99% of Raspberry Pi users who use it with a GUI will do, with some frequency (well, probably loading more than one page before quitting, but still...).

So I asked on Twitter:

Use a Raspberry Pi running Raspian OS behind a proxy server

I've been working on figuring out some interesting ways to use my revision A Raspberry Pi, and one of the things I'm doing with it requires it to work correctly behind a corporate proxy server. If you're in a similar situation, and need your Pi to work with a proxy server, it's simple to get set up:

You need to edit the ~/.profile file (where ~ is your home folder, e.g. /home/jeffgeerling, adding the following lines to the bottom of the file:

# Proxy server (example: http://username:[email protected]:8080). User/pass optional.
export http_proxy=http://[user]:[pass]@[proxy_server_address]:[port]

# Proxy exclusions (don't use the proxy server for these hostnames and IP addresses).
export no_proxy=localhost,127.0.0.0/8

If you'd also like the proxy to apply when running sudo commands and when using your Pi as the root user, you need to add the same configuration to /root/.profile (this would be helpful if you need to use sudo apt-get to install or update software packages).