Tag Archives: CPU

What’s Up, Home? – Raspberry Pi 4: goodbye or good buy for running Zabbix?

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-raspberry-pi-4-goodbye-or-good-buy-for-running-zabbix/25558/

Is Raspberry Pi 4 a goodbye or a good buy for running Zabbix? How is it performance-wise? Is it reliable? Here’s my nine-month review of it, with a splash of appliance/application performance monitoring.

In about April 2022 when it became clear that I am going to continue my home monitoring project, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 to run the show. Here’s my opinion on how well it is suited for running Zabbix.

Installing Zabbix

Applying that delicious layer of Zabbix on top of your Raspberry Pi 4 cake is extremely straightforward, as just like for every other platform that Zabbix officially supports, they do have packages and instructions to set up what you’d like to run.

So many options to choose from!

After installing the packages, the next steps are just like with Zabbix running on any other platform, so I am not going to dive into that now.

Modifications to my Raspberry setup

As I do not need to run a graphical environment on my Raspberry, I did disable the graphical environment from starting at all to save some precious RAM and other resources.

After some time I did also purchase an external USB hard disk, as the memory card from where Raspberry Pi 4 runs its OS is not very snappy, especially with write operations, and can also run tight on free space.

Other than that, my Raspberry Pi 4 is running pretty much by default.

How about the performance?

The graphs that you are about to see are from nine months period of time, as that’s about as long I have had the device.

No problem with the CPU usage. It’s been creeping up a little bit over time though, as I have been adding new items to monitoring and also additional software, such as HomeBridge and Home Assistant.

It still has available memory, even though the device runs Zabbix server, MariaDB, Grafana, Mosquitto, Home Assistant and HomeBridge.

As you can see, the number of running processes has grown significantly as I have been adding other stuff than Zabbix.

It’s easy to see when I did switch from an internal memory card to an external USB drive. The disk I/O utilization percentage is hovering at very tolerable levels.

I/O latency has remained about the same.

With only Zabbix, MariaDB and Grafana running the device remained around the 55-60C area, but has been warming to about 70C with the additional software. Still not too bad.

Splash of APM

Have you ever wondered what happens to the memory usage of a wrapper shell script that runs other scripts in a loop and keeps doing that until it’s manually stopped? This happens, it’s boringly stable. The results are brought you to by Zabbix Agent 2 process discovery.

Really, it does not vary much.

But as I have been adding new stuff, clearly the OS needs to do some more swapping and even the script has more page faults than before.

There’s more than that to process discovery, but those were some examples.

Zabbix server itself is doing very well, here are some example stats.

My conclusion: Raspberry Pi 4 is an excellent Zabbix server for smaller environments and a very good Zabbix proxy candidate. It’s been rock solid.

This post was originally published on the author’s page.

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

Post Syndicated from Nitin Rao original https://blog.cloudflare.com/designing-edge-servers-with-arm-cpus/

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

Cloudflare has millions of free customers. Not only is it something we’re incredibly proud of in the context of helping to build a better Internet — but it’s something that has made the Cloudflare service measurably better. One of the ways we’ve benefited is that it’s created a very strong imperative for Cloudflare to maintain a network that is as efficient as possible. There’s simply no other way to serve so many free customers.

In the spirit of this, we are very excited about the latest step in our energy-efficiency journey: turning to Arm for our server CPUs. It has been a long journey getting here — we started testing our first Arm CPUs all the way back in November 2017. It’s only recently, however, that the quantum of energy efficiency improvement from Arm has become clear. Our first Arm CPU was deployed in production earlier this month — July 2021.

Our most recently deployed generation of edge servers, Gen X, used AMD Rome CPUs. Compared with that, the newest Arm based CPUs process an incredible 57% more Internet requests per watt. While AMD has a sequel, Milan (and which Cloudflare will also be deploying), it doesn’t achieve the same degree of energy efficiency that the Arm processor does — managing only 39% more requests per watt than Rome CPUs in our existing fleet. As Arm based CPUs become more widely deployed, and our software is further optimized to take advantage of the Arm architecture, we expect further improvements in the energy efficiency of Arm servers.

Using Arm, Cloudflare can now securely process over ten times as many Internet requests for every watt of power consumed, than we did for servers designed in 2013.

(In the graphic below, for 2021, the perforated data point refers to x86 CPUs, whereas the bold data point refers to Arm CPUs)

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

As Arm server CPUs demonstrate their performance and become more widely deployed, we hope this will inspire x86 CPUs manufacturers (such as Intel and AMD) to urgently take energy efficiency more seriously. This is especially important since, worldwide, x86 CPUs continue to represent the vast majority of global data center energy consumption.

Together, we can reduce the carbon impact of Internet use. The environment depends on it.