benchmarks

At this point, I've showed you how you can use the Turing Pi as a Kubernetes cluster to run different things. I barely scratched the surface of what's possible with Kubernetes, but I'm planning on doing another series exploring Kubernetes itself later this year. Subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to see it!

In this post, I'm going to talk about the Turing Pi's performance. I'll compare it to a more traditional Raspberry Pi cluster, my Pi Dramble, and talk about important considerations for your cluster, like what kind of storage you should use, or whether you should run a 32-bit or 64-bit Pi operating system.

As with all the other work I've done on this cluster, I've been documenting it all in my open source Turing Pi Cluster project on GitHub.

Video version of this post

This blog post has a companion video embedded below:

This morning the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a new 8 GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4. They've been selling a 1, 2, and 4 GB version for the past year, and I've been using all three models in my projects.

More RAM is always better, because you can fit more applications on the same Pi, especially if you're using them in a Kubernetes cluster, like I am in my Turing Pi Cluster series!

 ____________________________________________
/ Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, \
\ prepare to die. (Klingon Proverb)          /
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        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

(Excerpt from Ansible for DevOps, chapter 12.)

The fallout from this year's microSD card performance comparison has turned into quite a rabbit hole; first I found that new 'A1' and 'A2' classifications were supposed to offer better performance than the not-Application-Performance-class-rated cards I have been testing. Then I found that A2 rated cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi—in fact they didn't even perform half as well as they were supposed to, for 4K random reads and writes, on any hardware I have in my possession.

Update: See follow-up post about A1 vs A2 performance, Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice?.

After I published my 2019 Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison, I received a lot of feedback about newer 'A2' Application Performance class microSD cards, and how they could produce even better performance for a Raspberry Pi.

None of these cards are fakes; grainy halftone printing is visible because I shot this with a macro lens.

Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi.

As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was introduced almost a decade ago. I have owned and used every generation of Raspberry Pi, in addition to most of the popular competitors. You can search my site for tons of articles on these experiences.

Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I stated:

One of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance is to buy the fastest possible microSD card—especially for applications where you need to do a lot of random reads and writes.

Three generations of multi-core Pi: model 2 B, model 3 B, model 3 B+

Whether it's been a 6-node Raspberry Pi cluster running Drupal 8, or a distributed home temperature monitoring application, I use Raspberry Pis for a wide variety of fun projects. The Raspberry Pi model 3 B+ is the latest iteration of the 'top of the line' Pi, with all the bells and whistles, and it still comes in at just $35. This year's iteration improves the CPU frequency, wired LAN performance, and WiFi performance, among other smaller changes, and I ordered one and have taken it for a spin.

What follows are my benchmarks and impressions after a couple weeks poking and prodding the new model 3 B+.

tl;dr: The ODROID-C2 is a very solid competitor to the Raspberry Pi model 3 B, and is anywhere from 2-10x faster than the Pi 3, depending on the operation. The software and community support is nowhere near what you get with the Raspberry Pi, but it's the best I've seen of all the Raspberry Pi clones I've tried.

On Pi Day (3/14/16), I finally acquired a Raspberry Pi model 3 B from my local Micro Center (I had ordered one from Pimoroni on launch day, but it must be stuck in customs). After arriving home with it, I decided to start running it through its paces. Below is my review and extensive benchmarking of the Pi 3 (especially in comparison to the Pi 2).

Hardware changes

There are a few notable hardware changes on the Pi 3:

Late last year, I published a blog post with comprehensive benchmarks of various microSD cards used with the internal Raspberry Pi 2 reader, based on the comprehensive (and always-up-to-date Raspberry Pi microSD card benchmark page I maintain for the Pi Dramble project). After publishing the blog post, a few different readers pointed me to some overclocking tweaks that could help boost the speeds further for UHS microSD cards, allowing large file I/O speed to double, and random I/O to get a solid boost as well.