On 01-12-2020 09:44, Mike Scott wrote:
> On 29/11/2020 08:15, A. Dumas wrote:
>> The Pi4 has a true 1 Gbps ethernet port and two
>> usb 3.0 ports of 4.8 Gbps (what others now call usb 3.1 gen 1). This is
>> possible because the new chip has PCIe (x1).
>
> Thanks all for the comments. I've played with a pi3 (and earlier), but
> it's clearly too slow even for my home network; I'm sort-of hoping a pi4
> would be up to the job. Just a little pricey to buy and try yet another
> unless there's a real chance it'd be a go-er.

To avoid disappointment, I think you should try & establish some
performance criteria, as detailed and specific as possible, that you'd
be happy with. Then investigate if they can be met (for example, by
asking here or on the RPi forum). For instance:

- must be freebsd
- will be used wired on a gigabit switch
- application is samba server
- large file read throughput must be x MB/s

I use my Pi4 4GB on ethernet, it boots from usb3 ssd, it's in a passive
heatsink case (cpu temp below 40C for ambient of ~18C). It runs my
development web server + database (apache2, php7, mariadb10) which it
does fine. I run some backup scripts which I never notice interfering. I
test bash scripts, no problem of course. Sometimes I fire up VNC from my
desktop and use Mathematica on the Pi which is a bit slow but useable.
Recently I set it up as a jupyter notebook server on the LAN which works
well (but I end up using the local python install, anyway). Without
overclock:

$ time /usr/bin/factor 1234567890123456789012345678901
1234567890123456789012345678901: 7742394596501 159455563099482401

real 0m2,086s
user 0m2,075s
sys 0m0,011s

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