Raspberry Pi heat sinks – are these needed to keep things cool and running optimally or overkill? Two years ago I purchased a small 3 piece set of copper heat sinks from Ebay for my Raspberry Pi, I was intending to compare the temperature differences with and without them. This was inspired from the testing I did in my Raspberry Pi overclocking benchmarks however I just never got around to putting the heat sinks to use – until now!
Recently I decided to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8, and to coincide with this I went for a new SSD to use for the primary disk. I have been using an OCZ Vertex 2 for about 2 and a half years with no issues, however it was only 60gb which was a bit limiting, and a fair amount slower in comparison to SSD’s available today.
I bought a new Intel 520 Series 180gb SSD, opened up my PC case and swapped it with the OCZ Vertex 2.
Out with the old, in with the new.
Today it has been announced that if you are using the Wheezy image of Raspbian you can update to allow dynamic overclocking without voiding warranty. I’ve been using my Raspberry Pi for a little while now and have begun to notice the CPU limitations when compiling code and performing other tasks so I jumped at the opportunity to give this a go. I’ll briefly go through the steps I went through in order to update the OS, as well as provide a basic benchmark that will display the changes.
I’ve been benchmarking different web servers recently and this post contains all of my results as well as information on how the tests were performed during the process.
I have benchmarked Apache 2.2, Apache 2.4, Nginx, Lighttpd, Varnish, Litespeed, Cherokee and G-WAN web servers when running on 1 CPU core, 2 CPU cores, 4 CPU cores and 8 CPU cores while loading a 100 byte static HTML page to determine the difference between them in performance.
2016 Update: I have run the tests again with up to date web server versions in 2016.
Here is a quick benchmark of IIS 7.5 and IIS 8 to get an idea of the performance difference between these two Microsoft web servers for Windows on different numbers of CPU cores and different levels of concurrent connections. IIS 7.5 was tested on Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, while IIS 8 was tested on the Release Candidate of Windows Server 2012.
Recently I’ve been using a great benchmarking took called Weighttpd, from the makers of the Lighttpd Web Server. Weighttpd is great because it is multithreaded, unlike it’s ancient and still used predecessor, Apache Benchmark (ab). I have made a short PowerShell script that uses this tool in Windows in order to run benchmarks that step through concurrency levels.