Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sangnoir 665 days ago
I mean, I do projects on mine too. Without OP describing what the projects are; you're assuming they are CPU-bound.

Speaking of my projects - the RPi is perfectly capable of working as a web crawler (at a page rate that may surprise you) as well as a media download client & transcoder (again, simultaneously transcoding a number of streams that may surprise you).
2 comments
weweweoo 665 days ago
Yes, the pi is perfectly fine for many projects, and in fact I have a couple of old pi's (even the original pi 1!) running tasks, such as listening sensors over bluetooth, pihole as DNS server etc.

The reason I prefer mini-pc's over pi is the x86 architecture and possibility to add more RAM. For maximum flexibility, I mostly run my self-hosted services inside virtual machines that I manage with Proxmox, and pi isn't ideal for that. Admittedly I found even the mini-pc's too limited due to lack of space/pcie slots for a GPU, and ended up with a custom desktop build. That allows me to experiment with stuff like self-hosted AI, and game remotely. Support for ECC RAM and more SSD's was a big plus too.

So, indeed it all depends on what and how much you want to do with the machines.

link
BoredPositron 665 days ago
It's fine that it's enough for you and I applaud you. I was also not only talking about CPU but also IOPs some of us have more demand on what we call a server. I don't understand how you can be so defensive about a piece of hardware it's actually rather concerning and my zero w 2 does have problems with FullHD streams with high bitrates. It doesn't even have the io bandwidth to push more than one stream.
link
sangnoir 665 days ago
I'm defending "right-sizing' the compute to match the workload; and the RPis are entirely capable to handle most "ambient computing" batched tasks.

My homelab includes 1L PCs and 1 U rackmounts (actual servers) - I appreciate what each brings to the table.

link