Minimum hardware requirements?
Wondering if anyone has run into performance issues with SignalK and if so what hardware it is running on? I think I've seen some discussion of performance issues from way too many AIS targets nearby? (I am not personally, I'm just curious about the resource usage and how simple/low power of a server could handle running things well)
4 Replies
AIS targets should not impact cpu performance much. They don’t update often. It would affect memory usage.
There are people running on Pi-Zeros
It just comes down to how much data is being processed
And how fast
I ran into performance limitations when running influxDB/grafana …. was using a LOT off stored data in influx with quite a bunch graphs etc in grafana..
that was back in rpi3 days .. i solved it by upgrading to rpi4 with 8G RAM
(i think my earlier issue may have been from the 1? or 2G of RAM on pi3)
Much also depends on whether (if you're running on a Pi) you have a full desktop environment installed, light, or headless. Nothing to do with SK per se but I have found that the Zero/Z2W can not run a desktop without extreme latency, high load, and constant swap, which would have a big impact on SK.
One totally anecdotal data point: a HALPI-M on my boat running on a Raspberry Pi CM4 (identical to Pi4B in performance) and 8 GB of memory has CPUs idling between 88-90% of time. It's processing roughly 370 deltas per second and storing most of the data in InfluxDB on an SSD. Opening an automatically refreshing Grafana dashboard drops the idling rate by a couple of percentage points.
It seems to be difficult to make any significant dent in the CPU use. If it serves two video streams, Grafana dashboard and Freeboard-SK and I actively pan and zoom around in Freeboard, I can get the idle rate drop to maybe below 80%.
This is all in headless use, that is, without a display.