Does Pimatic support the 4 cores on the RPI3?

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I am running pimatic for more than 2 years now. Nowadays on the latest 0.9 release.
This is an awsome product and very stable.

I am still using two RPI B+ as pimatic hosts. The startup with losts of objects, rules and plugins is very slow (+/- 30 minutes) and the startup and the refresh of the webinterface is also slow.

I wondered if I switch to a RPI3, the performance will be better? And how much?
Does Pimatic use the quad core fully or does it only use one core?

Who can answer this question?

Kind regards,

Edautz

@edautz node.js is single threaded and thus, the execution of single application cannot be spread to multiple cores at the same time. However, there are several other processes running on Linux systems and these can run on the other core rather than interupting the execution of the application all the time. If you use pimatic-shell-execute or pimatic-homeduino with “gpio” configuration subprocesses which most likely will run faster on a system with multiple cores.

Having said node.js is single thread I should also say there techniques to utilize a miltiple core by having multiple child processes spawned by the applicatons which act as workers. However, this is not supported by pimatic.

Besides the “multi-core” aspect there other factors which should be considered:

• RPI3 has a faster CPU, i.e. hiergher clock speed and improved CPU architecture
• RPI3 has more RAM, this will also speed up execution significantly

On the down-side the RPI3 produces more heat and has slightly higher power consumption.

See also: https://www.element14.com/community/community/raspberry-pi/blog/2016/02/29/the-most-comprehensive-raspberry-pi-comparison-benchmark-ever

running my productive system on a pi3 which works pretty good and stable. the speed compared to pi1 is really better, much faster and more responsive. compared to pi2 it’s even faster but not that much.
i am having a CPU temp of approx 52°C. with pi1 it was about 42°C.
i recommend to upgrade your hardware for usage with v0.9

Hello,
Yes like @leader21 and @mwittig said,
much faster…

my reboot take’s about 1-2 minutes.
(he also starts Plex)

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Chris

Ok responders, the answers are very clear. I can expect a good performance increase. I am going to order a couple RPI3 to upgrade my pimatic hosts.

Thanks alot and keep up the good work,

Kind regards,

Edautz

Another example:
at work I have a Pimatichost also…

• round about 60-80 devices, 100 rules lots of iframes, a volszaehler-host, apache-server, ffmpeg running

Here the reboot needs 2-3 minutes and the web-gui needs also 2-5 seconds to let you in the first time you are calling the URL…

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Chris

Tomorrow I recieve the new RPI3’s. Do I have to do a complete reinstall for Pimatic or is a reinstall of node.js according this link

https://pimatic.org/guide/getting-started/installation/

enough to keep my current implementation?

Kind regards,

Edautz

you have to install a new linux system to support the quadcore cpu.
therefore you need to reinstall node and all other stuff you must have to run pimatic.
so a new installation will become neccesary.

Make sure you backup your (external) scripts, your config.json and your database.
After the new installation you stop pimatic, simply copy your old files in and restart pimatic.

Recieved the new RPI3 yesterday. Did an upgrade of one of my pimatic hosts. I was already running Raspbian Jessie, supporting the multicore environement.

Swapped the hardware, tried first only the install the new node version with:
wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v4.6.2/node-v4.6.2-linux-armv7l.tar.gz -P /tmp
cd /usr/local
sudo tar xzvf /tmp/node-v4.6.2-linux-armv7l.tar.gz --strip=1
(as desbribed in the installation manual)

over the old node implementation.

By suprise it work directly with maintaining my complete setup, I only had to reconfigure the hardware path to my USB devices (/dev/serial/by-path) in the pimatic config, because I use a homeduino and mysensors gateway together, and this paths are different on a RPI3.

My startup times are reduced to 2 minutes, and the webrepons is within 5 seconds.

Thanks for all for your help.

Kind regards,

Edautz

nice to hear! so the upgrade has been a great success

Thnx. Running stable for half a day now.

Hopefully it solves the nasty problem [pimatic 0.9.33 cron 0.8.8] rule trigger problem #983
also.

This problem seems to be solved, with the update:

[pimatic] Gui time-outs while update rules or devices. #989

Issue #983 and #989 solved with this hardware upgrade and the node.js upgrade from V4.4.5 armv6 to V4.6.2 armv7.
Systems are rock stable and for my perception unusual fast.