Is it Possible to Run a Web Server in a Raspberry like a Dedicated Server ? The Result is Amazing

    LISBON, PORTUGAL, March 29, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Raspberry have been one of the greatest revolutions of the modern computing. It sold over 5 million units since 2015. Most of the people use it as a media center, videogames emulator console, music player, advertising outdoors... And now Copahost thought: why not using it as a dedicated server?

First of all, the setup

We used one stock Raspberry Pi 3 B (49EUR), with 1GB of RAM and a 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU. The storage is one 32GB Adata Class 10 MicroSD card (9EUR).

This Cortex-A53 is 10 times faster than the original Raspberry 1 CPU. That's a huge improvement.

We installed the operating system Raspbian Jessie on it, and then we brought the Raspberry "junior" dedicated server into the datacenter and powered it on.

By default, Raspbian will partition the SD card only using a small partition. We must enter raspi-config, in order to expand the filesystem to use all the avaialble space in the SD card.

Installing the server enviroment - Apache MySQL and PHP

We prepared a standard and popular enviroment, similar of a dedicated server. We installed and configured Apache 2, PHP 5 and MySQL 5.6. We have prepared our Raspberry to run a Wordpress website as a test.

Let's see it running. How did it perform? Here's the results of the Benchmark of a standard old Dedicated server vs Raspberry Pi 3 B

We made a stress test in the webserver, to check what was its limit. We performed 50 concurrent and sequential connections to it, using curl. The result was amazing. It was pretty stable with up to 35 connections, and still worked fine with 50 simultaneous connections!

A very crowded website, with 1 million pageviews per month, usually have from 10 to 20 concurrent connections.

Afterwards, we tested the CPU performance. Of course we know Raspberry have a simple CPU, compatible with its price. So we put an old dedicated server together and tested both of them with sysbench for linux.

In Sysbench we got a score of 40.23s in E2180 versus 954.90s in Raspberry Pi 3. The lower, the better. The performance of the Raspberry Pi 3 may be a bit disappointing if compared with a standard dedicated server.

In other words, this CPU is 23 times slower than a standard Pentium Dual Core.

Conclusion: is it possible to run Raspberry Pi as a dedicated server in production ?

The Cortex-A5 CPU, present in Raspberry 3, is 10 times faster than Raspberry Pi 2 CPU. Using it to host a simple site with a simple MySQL database works perfectly. You can consider using a Raspberry dedicated server for simple operations. As you populate a MySQL database with many results, or install some Wordpress plugins, the performance may be suffer a bit.

The pros:
Very low power consumption
Can be used as a small and simple web and database server
External USB Hard disks can be connected to it
Very low price
Nice style

The cons:
Poor CPU performance
Poor IO performance, as it depends on a SD card
Lacks a reboot button (there are some mods for it)

For those who needs a cheap but a powerful server, the best option is still a VPS Server.

In the next versions, Raspberry should be more competitive and able to handle more and more crowded websites. Copahost hope the "Junior server" will grow and be a competitive piece of hardware within a few years.

Article source: http://www.copahost.com/blog/is-it-possible-to-run-a-web-server-in-a-raspberry-pi-3-as-a-dedicated-server/

Copahost is a dedicated servers and vps hosting company founded in 2008. It hosts more than 20,000 domain names and over 500 servers.

Website: http://www.copahost.com

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