Hello everyone, I have a Raspberry Pi 4B with 2GBs of RAM. I am trying to run all the *arr stack via docker containers(5 or 6 containers) but this causes my Raspberry Pi to lag very much. I could not use any of the stack’s web interface or SSH to the pi during the lag and to fix it I had to reset the pi.
I think it is because I have little RAM but it might also be the power supply because I sometimes get messages for undervoltage.
What do you think is happening and how could I fix it? Do I need to buy a more powerful device?
Thanks in advance.
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Do I need to buy a more powerful device?
Yes? You seem to have answered that yourself.
Run “free” and see how much memory is being consumed. And “top” as well (hitting ‘m’ will sorry by memory usage).
Just checked on my pi4 with 4GB of ram that has been running beautifully as a NAS with 2x10TB USB drives mirrored, *arr suite, and Jellyfin for a couple of years, only 250mb of RAM free. I’m glad I splurged and got the 4gb model.
2gb memory is not nearly enough.
While not untrue, it’s not entirely accurate. My entire arr stack runs on a 3b+ with just a gig of ram, with some still left over. It all depends on what, and how you run it
Agree! I had arr stack + nextcloud on rpi4 4GB and it was using bit less than 3GB after restart, but after some time it would hit 4GB and start using SWAP and I would have issue just like OP. Solved that by moving server to DIY PC with 8 GB, but then I added many more services and had to upgrade to 16 GB. Sitting at 4+GB free RAM all the time while using 40+ services
I saw that it uses about 1,3 GB of memory. This means another 700MB remain. Because of this, I don’t think the cause is the memory. Also, I forgot to mention that I am also running qbittorrent for downloading, gluetun for VPN, and jellyfin and jellyseerr.
What’s your cooling solution?
Could it be throttling the cpu?
I have a heatsink above CPU, RAM, and Wi-Fi card. I think I should get a fan.
OK, I am trying to setup a swap partition right now to see if that will improve performance.
You can also just make a swap file, you won’t have to make partition that way
You don’t want a swap file on the SD card as excessive writes will kill it rather quickly.
So does a swap partition. I just meant that’s an option as an alternative to it. But now that I think about it, not enough RAM wouldn’t cause performance issues anyway, it would just cause random applications to stop working.
File and partition get just as many writes. In fact files are better because you can create a second file on a different location and move the swap more easily to try to keep the writes spread across the card.
Begin with listing what exactly you’re trying to run. I am running this myself, on hardware that’s worse than yours. You have to make choices more carefully
