[Dxspider-support] RPI 4 settings for reduced writes to SD card

[Matthew Chambers]

Ideally you never want to use swap anyways. I have a full blown Dell
PowerEdge server running CentOS that I use for my webserver that has swap
but has yet to ever touch it. My desktop does end up all the using swap
because of web browser memory leakage and I can tell because everything
comes to a near halt. Swap usage is slow and inefficient and a sign there
is something else wrong. I can't imagine DX Spider ever needing that much
memory that it has to fall into swap usage.

Matthew Chambers, CBT, NR0Q
Owner/Engineer
*M Chambers Communications Engineering LLC*
PO BOX 855, Moberly, MO 65270
Mobile (660)415-5620
www.mchambersradio.com



On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 8:03 AM Michael Walker via Dxspider-support <
dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I have had class 10 cards fail in much less than a year on 2 weather
> stations.  I can't tell you why, but the file system did go read only on
> each of them.
>
> I also routinely turn off the Swap storage if I know that I will never
> surpass the RAM storage available without issue.  Since my RPI's are built
> for a single purpose they don't come close to over running maximum RAM.
>
> I really don't require the /data directory, so I will move that to a
> ramdisk.  Should I ever need it, I can turn it back on to debug as
> required.   I managed to go 5 years without looking at it at all.  :)  The
> DXSpider code is pretty solid so it is rare it might be needed.
>
> I found log2ram some time ago https://github.com/azlux/log2ram and that
> made it pretty easy to configure.
>
> Thanks for the input.  Mike va3mw
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 6:55 PM JOSEPH REED <joe at n9jr.com> wrote:
>
>> A Class 10 SD card doesn’t fail in 6-9 months, but it will fail.  You
>> have two USB 3 ports on the Pi 4.  The best and easiest way I know it to
>> acquire an inexpensive USB SSD drive.  Attach it and clone the SD to the
>> SSD but with different partition IDs.  Edit /boot/boot.txt and replace the
>> partition ID of rootfs with the rootfs partition of the SSD.  You will boot
>> from the SD, but after boot everything is on the SSD.
>>
>> And you do not want to turn off swap!
>>
>> Joe N9JR
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 30, 2020, at 7:36 AM, Michael Walker via Dxspider-support <
>> dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> Hi All
>>
>> A few weeks ago I moved my Cluster over to a RPI4 where it hums along
>> nicely.
>>
>> I know from many weather stations that the SD card will go into a read
>> only state in about 6-9 months as writes start to fail.  Running IOTOP
>> tells me what we do significant writes to the card.
>>
>> Does anyone have a list of things they do to minimize the writes?
>>
>> On my list I have:
>>
>>
>>    1. Turn off the swap space
>>    2. Move /spider/data to a RAM disk
>>
>> Anything else?
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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