Re: What do I need to go with a Pi 4

In message <uv3jsh$l8h$1@dont-email.me>, David Taylor <david-taylor@blueyonder.co.uk.invalid> writes

On 09/04/2024 13:52, Adrian wrote:

I'm currently running a Pi2, which has a BME280 (via a hat) and a SSD
attached to it.  The Pi is now starting to struggle to generate graphs
for my home website, so I'm thinking of swapping it for a Pi4.  A
rummage online doesn't seem to fully answer my questions.
 Apart from the Pi4, to upgrade, I know that I will need a bigger power
supply and a HDMI adapter lead, but after, things are a bit vague.  Can
I get away with the Pi4 without any additional cooling, or do I need a
heat sink or fan, and if so, how do they get on with the hat ?  The
space it is in has had a temperature range of -1 to 40 degrees C, the
mean across that time is about 15.5C.
 TIA
 Adrian

>
Adrian,
>
No problem with the other suggestions.
>
When you say "starting to struggle" what have you measured?  Are you running out of memory, CPU power, disk I/O, or network I/O?  I think it would be useful to know what exactly in your system needs changing.
>

The Pi is run headless in the normal way of things, but being able to connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor is helpful for the initial set up.
I monitor (every minute), CPU usage and temperature, as well as free memory (in addition to time to ping the router, space used on the SD card and SSD, bytes in/out and logical block access on the SSD).  I can also see (using ls) how long it takes for the graphs (as png files) to be created.
On Sunday, I updated matplotlib (hoping, and failing, to fix a rendering problem).  The previous version was ~2.5 years old.  Since then, the time taken to generate graphs has risen enormously.  What had taken ~5 minutes is now taking 12, which isn't good when you do it at a 10 minute interval.  Saturday's CPU usage was a  fairly typical 0.01 3.27 0,65 (min, max, mean), whereas yesterday's was 0.15 9.24 3.92.  Memory usage doesn't seem vastly different, and CPU temperature was slightly lower, although that is to an extent governed by the ambient temperature, which has dropped slightly.  The other resources appeared to be normalish (they vary a bit anyway).  So from what I can see, the problem is that I'm badly lacking in CPU power rather than other resources.

It's possible that a Pi 3B+ might be a sufficient upgrade (but can you still get them?).
>

The rationale of looking at a Pi4 rather than a Pi3, was to make a jump ahead so that I've got some spare capacity on the Pi, which gives me room for further expansion, which I'm likely to need in the near future. For no obvious reason, the Pi5 hadn't entered my thought processes.
Thanks
Adrian
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