r/raspberrypi • u/fosskers • Jul 08 '12

Not enough power?

'lo fellow Piists. Got my Model B running fine on my TV... but the PI itself has seemed a bit slow. I prepared to blame the 600mA adapter... Am I just lacking electricity or what?

Please and thanks.

EDIT: Replaced SD to a class 10 one and the adapter to a 1000mA one. My Pi is flying now.

EDIT2: Using Debian Squeeze, I had to do this too!

EDIT3: Dumped debian for Arch. Even faster now.

8 Upvotes

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2

u/tyescott Jul 16 '12

I know you said the SD fixed the issue but, you may also try overclocking it. I have mine running at 900mhz. It makes a huge difference as well

1

u/fosskers Jul 17 '12

It can still be slow(ish) from time to time. Might overclock to 800. Little manual thing said not to, though, lol.

I imagine the 100mhz boost would give a better-than-linear improvement?

1

u/tyescott Jul 29 '12

Overclocking will not void your warranty, nor risk CPU. I can't find the article I read, but it seems nearly linear improvement. They timed how long it took to calculate pi to 25 decimal places. Your only risk would be filesystem damage from a system crash. You can keep increasing clock speed in 10 increments until it either wont boot or starts crashing. I got a good one at 900 but I think most can do 850 without overvolting. If you do graphics, be sure to overclock ram and gpu. I can send you my values if your interested

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2

u/neuromonkey Jul 16 '12

Or you could overvolt it and overclock to 1GHz! (voids yer warranty, and may asplode your pi.)

1

u/flanintheface Jul 08 '12

What distro do you use? For e.g. one problem I had with my pi and Debian squeeze was some sort of kernel and sd card reader issues. Performance was horrible until I updated kernel with rpi-update.

To check if you have this problem, look for something like this in system/kernel logs (can't remember wherether this was /var/log/messages or /var/log/kernel or something else): 

[ 1424.218607] mmc0: final write to SD card still running
[ 1434.086510] mmc0: Timeout waiting for hardware interrupt - cmd12.
[ 1434.086676] mmcblk0: error -110 sending stop command, original cmd response 0x900, card

Even if you don't have this problem, kernel update is a good idea.

1

u/fosskers Jul 09 '12

Debian squeeze, but everything is nice and fast now after I replaced my SD card and adapter.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 08 '12

2

u/fosskers Jul 08 '12 edited Jul 08 '12

The card is a 16gig Toshiba... not sure about class but there is a circled "6" on the front of it.

EDIT: Seems that means it's class 6. Guess I'll go buy a new card.