If you're not using the GUI, it's generally better to start with the Lite edition of the OS. Lite is the same OS, it just doesn't have the GUI and apps pre-installed. It's not really for stability (ignoring any current/ongoing issues arising from the X11->Wayfire->Labwc transition); the more important thing, in my opinion, is that it lowers the baseline memory usage which is always a good thing on systems which have a relatively limited RAM size. Slimming down the OS footprint for these tiny, low power SBCs is generally a good thing overall; particularly if you're running off microSD due to the much lower disk performance than SATA or NVMe. Less RAM usage by processes means more RAM available for caches, which can really help some server applications that are dealing with the same small dataset continuously.
As far as Pi4 vs Pi5 goes, they are similar in terms of ARM technology level (ARMv8 vs ARMv8.2, and Cortex-A72 vs Cortex-A76 CPUs), but the Pi5 offers significantly more performance. If you don't want/need the performance, the Pi4 is a mature and proven product that still has a long support life ahead of it (currently stated as expected to be in production until "at least January 2034"), and may be slightly cheaper. A Pi4 will happily saturate the gigabit Ethernet port if the server process is light enough (although microSD will limit that if it's having to read the data from disk instead of cache). There really shouldn't be much difference between the 4 and 5 for general stability, but the 4 is mature and the 5 is still new-ish. Although the 5 is new-ish, it's not such a huge technology jump from the 4, more just an incremental evolutionary step; other than the significant increase in performance and things like the new IO chip and PCIe capability; i.e. the 5 does inherit some of the 4's proven stability. The 4 has a 1GB variant, if you have a lightweight use case and want to shave the cost down.
A lot of it depends on your server app(s). Both the 4 and 5 are pretty solid products if you do your side of the engineering and testing properly before putting them into production.
If you're actually going to be developing directly on a Pi, using it as a development workstation with full desktop, you really ought to use a Pi5 for that (ideally 8GB, but at least 4GB), as you'll benefit from the significant performance bump. There's nothing wrong with developing on a 5 and deploying on a 4, if that looks like a useful way of doing things.
As far as Pi4 vs Pi5 goes, they are similar in terms of ARM technology level (ARMv8 vs ARMv8.2, and Cortex-A72 vs Cortex-A76 CPUs), but the Pi5 offers significantly more performance. If you don't want/need the performance, the Pi4 is a mature and proven product that still has a long support life ahead of it (currently stated as expected to be in production until "at least January 2034"), and may be slightly cheaper. A Pi4 will happily saturate the gigabit Ethernet port if the server process is light enough (although microSD will limit that if it's having to read the data from disk instead of cache). There really shouldn't be much difference between the 4 and 5 for general stability, but the 4 is mature and the 5 is still new-ish. Although the 5 is new-ish, it's not such a huge technology jump from the 4, more just an incremental evolutionary step; other than the significant increase in performance and things like the new IO chip and PCIe capability; i.e. the 5 does inherit some of the 4's proven stability. The 4 has a 1GB variant, if you have a lightweight use case and want to shave the cost down.
A lot of it depends on your server app(s). Both the 4 and 5 are pretty solid products if you do your side of the engineering and testing properly before putting them into production.
If you're actually going to be developing directly on a Pi, using it as a development workstation with full desktop, you really ought to use a Pi5 for that (ideally 8GB, but at least 4GB), as you'll benefit from the significant performance bump. There's nothing wrong with developing on a 5 and deploying on a 4, if that looks like a useful way of doing things.
Statistics: Posted by Murph9000 — Fri Nov 08, 2024 7:37 am
