Raspberry Pi 4 Server Limits?

[Sirgeorge]

I haven't seen this answered for the latest generation of Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi 4). How many people could you reasonably host on a server using it? Website hosting? Minecraft? Web app?

 

What would the first bottleneck be? Let's assume the 4GB version here and connection through Ethernet for internet. I'm well aware of the difficulty in figuring this out without more specific details, but collective guessing is more accurate then individual guessing and this data IS useful to have as a placeholder so I'm asking.

[Firewrath9]

The first bottlenect would be the ARM uArch, many programs just won't run on it, im not sure if you can even host a minecraft server on a raspi.

[Sirgeorge]

1 minute ago, Firewrath9 said:

The first bottlenect would be the ARM uArch, many programs just won't run on it, im not sure if you can even host a minecraft server on a raspi.

I think you'll be in for a real treat then. Here's a tutorial for how to do it: https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-minecraft-server-on-raspberry-pi/ . The question is, what's the limit?

[Master Disaster]

Pretty quickly. I had a Ras Pi 4 running OMV as my NAS for 6 months (I upgraded to a Synology a few months back) and while it was a great NAS it could only do 3 to 4 simultaneous 1080p Streams (using Plex) before it got overwhelmed. For reference a 1080p Stream on my Synology doesn't even register on the system monitor.

 

Its great for a small house but I wouldn't recommend it for a lot of people.

[WereCatf]

5 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Pretty quickly. I had a Ras Pi 4 running OMV as my NAS for 6 months (I upgraded to a Synology a few months back) and while it was a great NAS it could only do 3 to 4 simultaneous 1080p Streams (using Plex) before it got overwhelmed. For reference a 1080p Stream on my Synology doesn't even register on the system monitor.

AFAIK, the Synology uses hardware-transcoding for Plex, so it's not quite comparable. RPi4 has to use software-transcoding.

[Firewrath9]

6 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

-snip-

yeah, also im pretty sure if you tried to transcode 1080p or 4k video, for example from h264 to HEVC or the other way around, the pi would just burn up.

[WereCatf]

18 minutes ago, Sirgeorge said:

I haven't seen this answered for the latest generation of Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi 4). How many people could you reasonably host on a server using it? Website hosting? Minecraft? Web app?

I have no idea about Minecraft, but for website-hosting or web-apps, it depends on the complexity of those. For a simple, static website, it could easily handle tens of thousands of people. On the other hand, some site that does some enormous server-side processing, it might not even handle one person well. It really depends on the specifics too much to be able to say anything particularly helpful.

[Firewrath9]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

AFAIK, the Synology uses hardware-transcoding for Plex, so it's not quite comparable. RPi4 has to use software-transcoding.

streaming =/= transcoding, transcoding requires some serious power, its basically handbraking the video live as you stream it. 

[WereCatf]

13 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

The first bottlenect would be the ARM uArch, many programs just won't run on it

ARM is actually one of the best-supported architectures on Linux.

[WereCatf]

2 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

streaming =/= transcoding, transcoding requires some serious power, its basically handbraking the video live as you stream it. 

I know the difference. Just streaming video without any transcoding is such a simple process that an RPi4 could easily handle that.

[Master Disaster]

6 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

AFAIK, the Synology uses hardware-transcoding for Plex, so it's not quite comparable. RPi4 has to use software-transcoding.

I don't transcode, all my videos are 1080p, most are x/h264 though I do have some HEVC files and when I stream its always at full quality.

[Master Disaster]

4 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

I know the difference. Just streaming video without any transcoding is such a simple process that an RPi4 could easily handle that.

You'd think so but in fact simply streaming a 1080p video (no transcoding) would eat like 10% of the CPU. Weirdly if I were to direct access the folder and watch the file straight from the NAS it didn't take anywhere near as much of a hit.

[WereCatf]

Just now, Master Disaster said:

I don't transcode, all my videos are 1080p, most are x/h264 though I do have some HEVC files and when I stream its always at full quality.

Have you actually checked if the Plex-server is transcoding or not? If you are watching on a device that doesn't support subtitles, like e.g. a web-browser, the Plex-server has to burn the subtitles in, which means it will have to do transcoding anyways. Also, if the device you are watching on doesn't support the audio-codec, the Plex-server will have to do transcoding on the audio.

[Firewrath9]

6 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

ARM is actually one of the best-supported architectures on Linux.

its still not as well supported as x86-64, in addition there is lots of software that simply won't run on ARM like proxmox

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

Have you actually checked if the Plex-server is transcoding or not? If you are watching on a device that doesn't support subtitles, like e.g. a web-browser, the Plex-server has to burn the subtitles in, which means it will have to do transcoding anyways. Also, if the device you are watching on doesn't support the audio-codec, the Plex-server will have to do transcoding on the audio.

Transcoding (or Converting as Plex calls it) was disabled in the settings menu. AFAIK there's no options for audio transcoding so I guess that's automatic?

[WereCatf]

Just now, Master Disaster said:

Transcoding (or Converting as Plex calls it) was disabled in the settings menu. AFAIK there's no options for audio transcoding so I guess that's automatic?

Yes, it is.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, Firewrath9 said:

its still not as well supported as x86-64, in addition there is lots of software that simply won't run on ARM like proxmox

I didn't say it's the best, I said it's one of the best. There's also software for ARM that doesn't run on x86-64 as well, so that doesn't mean much. Besides which, the underlying stuff that Proxmox uses does run on ARM: KVM/ARM exists, ZFS works fine and so on.

[Master Disaster]

4 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Yes, it is.

Thats possibly what was happening then, I thought it was weird that simply streaming a movie ate so much CPU time and as I said earlier, if I did a direct stream (so open the folder in Explorer and double click the video file) it wouldn't use anywhere near as much.

[Sirgeorge]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

Thats possibly what what happening then, I thought it was weird that simply streaming a movie ate so much CPU time and as I said earlier, if I did a direct stream (so open the folder in Explorer and double click the video file) it wouldn't use anywhere near as much.

I've done screen casting from my PC to my television on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it barely ate up anything.

[Firewrath9]

Just now, WereCatf said:

I didn't say it's the best, I said it's one of the best. There's also software for ARM that doesn't run on x86-64 as well

theres only like 2 relavant uArchs, x86, and ARM. saying its one of the best if its 2nd and last doesn't really mean much. Other uArchs like PowerPC, RISC-V, etc aren't really common for a home labber, or even in general.

 

Name software for home labs that only works on ARM. Only one I can think of is ARM software development

[WereCatf]

3 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

theres only like 2 relavant uArchs, x86, and ARM. saying its one of the best if its 2nd and last doesn't really mean much.

Software-availability-wise, yes, it definitely does mean much. Most software that is available for Linux is available for Linux on ARM. And before you decide to jump on it, no, I said "most", not "all."

 

5 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

Other uArchs like PowerPC, RISC-V, etc aren't really common for a home labber, or even in general.

Not for home-labber, but you'd be surprised by how many devices there are running Linux on e.g. MIPS-arch.

 

6 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

Name software for home labs that only works on ARM. Only one I can think of is ARM software development

I don't know of any, I don't know every single software-package that's ever been made. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

[Sirgeorge]

Anyone care to guess the number of users for minecraft then? Let's assume compatibility and simply focus on bottlenecks of traditional sorts (ram, ethernet speed, cpu, etc.)

[Salv8 (sam)]

18 hours ago, WereCatf said:

AFAIK, the Synology uses hardware-transcoding for Plex, so it's not quite comparable. RPi4 has to use software-transcoding.

if you are using plex, hardware transcoding is something you want especially if you are serving to a range of devices.

it's even needed at times when a client accesses a video file that it can't natively play (e.g mkv), so the server has to transcode it.

almost all of my plex media is in MKV (because anime subtitles) and many of my clients can't play it natively so it has to transcode it.

they enable it by default now on supported clients and you can even get a GPU to do it, it's a bit of a mixed bag but if you have a really complex video (e.g a 4k, HDR, 60 FPS, HVEC video) then it can really help so long as the GPU can handle that amount of work.

[Jarsky]

8 hours ago, Sirgeorge said:

Anyone care to guess the number of users for minecraft then? Let's assume compatibility and simply focus on bottlenecks of traditional sorts (ram, ethernet speed, cpu, etc.)

 

It's quite an ask, asking people to guess how some abstract java application which in and of itself has so many variables, runs on a fairly obscure device that people would pick to run such a thing. 

 

In saying that it seems theres discussion on raspberrypi forums about it: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=244249

 

 

I would point out that you'll probably want the 2GB version at least if not the 4GB version. Also the I/O would be disasterous to the SD card and trying to run off that would give you probably close to unplayable chunk generation when moving around. You'll probably need a minimum of a USB3.0 connected hard disk, if not a SSD to give you a playable experience.