[Solved] Benefit using a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB?

Hello, Dave,

not to my knowledge, 2GB is quite sufficient in my experience. I have tried it myself with 4GB and found no differences.

My recommendation, buy the 4GB. Whatever you save compared to the 8GB you can donate to the great eblocker project 😉

Are there many devices in the network?

sunny greetings
Jens

translation with deepl

Some facts: eBlocker works better/faster the more memory is available. Especially if you add individual blocker-lists 2GB RAM is the absolute minimum. The number of network devices has practically no impact on memory usage.

To my knowledge 8GB can not be addressed today as the underlying Raspian (debian linux) is 32bit at the moment. But surely there will be an update to 64bit „somewhen“.

That‘s why we recommend 4GB today but if you want to be long term future proof you can‘t go wrong with 8GB...

The ICAP server, the main process of the eBlocker, is currently limited to about 400MB memory usage and is still capable of holding additional blocking lists.

The whole system is certainly at its limits on a 1GB Pi, but without making changes to the image you currently cannot even benefit from more than 2GB.

Given that even the full rule set extracted from the DuckDuckGo tracker radar takes only about 3MB on disk (which maybe doubles when loaded into the system), I'd say that a 2GB Pi has more than enough resources.

Best regards,

Martin

@mainzelm That‘s great news. I understood the lists were blown up much more in RAM due to the use of bloom filters (which speeds up matching significantly). Btw. In the past we had challenges to squezze all in 1GB of the M2+ used in white cube.

Redundancy between lists is removed automatically - so this might save a lot if duckduckgo list has lot of overlap with other lists in use.

Would be great to chart real memory usage based on number of unique blocking rules to get a feeling about dependencies - also bandwidth and execution time chars were a dream... 😉 

@random @mainzelM

I spoke with @bpr about @mainzelM‘s finding regarding the low memory increase. This is indeed surprising. Bloom should theoretically increase memory usage much more - but it always depends on the number of entries added. 

Long story short: 2GB should be well sufficient even if you add extra blocking lists with millions of entries. 4GB is nice for the far future. 8GB makes not much sense for just eBlocker...

Recommendation: Get 2GB and if price difference to 4GB doesn't matter to you, get even 4GB. But waiting for 8GB which can not even be addressed today makes less sense.

Hello,

I have been using eBlocker since 07/2024 and am very happy with it. At the same time, I am following the development of the new version of the operating system with great interest. There's always something about "can't it be ready now? " 😄

In my euphoria, I probably overlooked the minimum requirements for the 4th version. While searching the forum, I came across this entry.

You describe the recommendations for the Raspberry 4 here. I myself use the Raspberry 3+ and it no longer supports the new 4 OS version, simply because the RAM is too low at 1 GB.

So buying a new Raspberry will be unavoidable if I want to use the new OS version. So at first I thought, take the larger version of the Rasperry 5, then you'll be on the safe side for a long time. However, the current prices do not share my thoughts.

So, to bring the thought to its conclusion: Will the same hardware - requirements apply to the Raspberry 5 and the new 4 OS version? In other words, will a Raspberry 5 with 4GB be completely sufficient in the long term?

Thank you for your answers.

Greetings

Peter

@honk77 To my knowledge, our recommendation is a Raspi 4 2GB. This also yields for eBlockerOS 4. 

Unless you have very high bandwidth requirements, I'd follow the recommendations.

THX!

@random 

Hi Random,

thanks for the quick reply.

Just so we're not talking at cross purposes, a quick question about:
"Unless you have very high bandwidth requirements, I'd follow the recommendations."

I have a 1GB line here at home, I work from home and apart from the odd video conference, it's the rest of the family that is responsible for the usual strain on the line: surfing & streaming.

But that doesn't define what you meant by “very high bandwidth requirements”?

Basically, I want to avoid having to replace the new Raspberry too quickly. But in the end, I only have to decide between 2 GB and 4 GB - depending on the price of the two variants

@honk77 The Raspi 5 is much faster than the Raspi 4. This will come handy if you have lot's of parallel HTTPS streams that need decryption/encryption (= high bandwidth requirements). For a 1GB line I'd actually wait for the Raspi 5 support if you are not in need to buy now. But 2GB RAM is sufficient in any case.

THX!