On 04/12/2019 02:03, bob prohaska wrote:
> Now that it's been out for a while, does anybody have a
> comparision of the Pi4 to the Pi3 as a platform for web
> browsers like chromium, firefox and any others that come
> to mind?
>
> I'm using a Pi3 as a workstation and it's entirely satisfactory
> except for the browser performance. Firefox-esr is painfully
> slow, chromium is much faster but only marginally stable, crashing
> the whole machine on ssec.wisc.edu when looking at Goes West images.
> Occastionally it also locks up on Google Maps, but not as often.

Using Chromium the Pi4 feels slightly faster than the Pi3+, but most
importantly due to the extra memory, it stays faster where as the Pi3+
hits a wall at some point when it has used all the memory. I've not had
crashes on either.

> Right now the machine is running Stretch, current as of today.
> There's an 8GB USB flash device for swap but not much is used,
> typically no more than a few hundred megs.

Even with a fast USB3.1 stick or a USB to SATA and an SSD, once the 1GB
Pi's run out of memory, and has to swap, it will almost freeze. If you
are lucky it will unfreeze after 30s to 1m, and you can close some tabs,
or restart the browser to free up memory.

> I don't really want another computer, but better browser
> performance would be a real temptation.

If you are doing desktop stuff, the 4GB Pi4 is a very worthwhile
upgrade. The Pi3+ is painful in comparison.

---druck

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