I have tested Raspberry Pi5 16GB

marcus

I received a Raspberry Pi5 16 GB today. I fired it up with an existing microSD card and Moodle Box. It worked as expected. I ran the benchmark report nad it seemed to report similar numbers as the 8GB, which didn't surprise me hugely. However I am not sure if a higher number means more spead or less speed. I have also been running it with the Goemaxima back end for the STACK question type which seems to perform without issue.

You can see the Jeff Geerling video about the new model here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apWi16EROKc&t=180s

Nicolas

marcus Could you test https://github.com/moodlebox/moodle-tool_moodlebox/pull/152 and report if your RPi 5 16GB is correctly detected and with the correct RAM size?

Ratna

Here is the original Moodle Benchmark thread [Moodle BenchMark] Need Beta-tester.

What is the size of the (synchronous) class you run on RPi 5? You know that MoodleBox runs perfectly smoothly on a R Pi Zero 2 W for a handful of synchronous users?

How big is the demand on Geomaxima and STACK backends? Any monitoring (load graphs)?

marcus

Does a higher number on benchmark mean things are better, or is a lower number better because it is faster?
I have a Rpi Small enough to hang on a lanyard around my neck that has run MoodleBox at some point, but I am interested in the various price/performance points for its use in classes. Would a Pi4 with 4G be a sweet spot for price/performance.

I suspect but am not certain that Goemaxima does not add a significant load at any point, but I am not certain. I will try getting some numbers with and without Goemaxima/docker running.

Ratna

In the breakdown (#1-9), the results are in seconds. So lower the better. The final score is all those times added and inverted. So a lower score is better. For sample results and a detailed discussion see [Moodle Benchmark] Why is the result of Test 2 good and that of Test 9 bad?.

P.S. I think this topic is better served in the Hardware and performance forum on moodle.org.

marcus

I have taken your code and combined it with some other updates.
https://github.com/moodlebox/moodle-tool_moodlebox/pull/153

ralfkrause

What will the software do with 16GB RAM? Do we get a bigger RAM disk or some caching? 16GB is big enough to copy the complete MoodleBox software into the RAM.

Ratna

That is exactly the question Jeff Geerling asked in the video linked to the first post. There are sure applications that never have enough RAM, but a Moodle server is not one of them. It is very much CPU and I/O bound. One could exchange the I/O limitations against RAM, but that need quite a bit of system administration - like loading the whole database in to the RAM, putting various temporary directories Moodle need, moodledata/cache/, etc. in to their own RAM disks. For the few really concurrent users one gets in a live class, there won't be any "speed" difference between 8 GB or 16 GB for a RPi 5. The "sweet spot" for RPi 4 should be lower, probably 4 GB is already "too much". These are expectations. One could only be sure after sophisticated benchmarking, like with JMeter. See github.com/moodlehq/moodle-performance-comparison.