Running on RaspberryPi

[Lucleonhart]

Hey there.
I found some first threads here about running sab on a raspberry pi, so because i am trying to achive the same.
At the moment i have serious problems with the stability of the system.
I am running SABnzbd, Sickbeard and Couchpotato right now on the debian distro.

SABnzbd is using 60% CPU and 20% memory while loading over a non SSL connection, everything looks good but suddenly the system gets less responsive and is crashing.
I will try to set it up again with another distro just to try and wanted to ask if anyone have some improvements for this system.

Thanks!

[shypike]

How much memory does this Pi have?

[sander]

How much memory does this Pi have?

256 mb
cpu is eq to 300 mhz intel

So ...

[hanker]

Hey there.
I found some first threads here about running sab on a raspberry pi, so because i am trying to achive the same.
At the moment i have serious problems with the stability of the system.
I am running SABnzbd, Sickbeard and Couchpotato right now on the debian distro.

SABnzbd is using 60% CPU and 20% memory while loading over a non SSL connection, everything looks good but suddenly the system gets less responsive and is crashing.
I will try to set it up again with another distro just to try and wanted to ask if anyone have some improvements for this system.

Thanks!

I have sabnzbd (but no sickbeard or couchpotato) running on a Seagate Dockstar with Debian squeeze. It has a 1.2 GHz ARM processor and 128 MB RAM. Works great. I'm downloading something right now at about 400 kB/s and the load average is at

Code: Select all

Load average: 0.20 0.28 0.28

I had also hoped to get this running on a r-pi eventually.

[sander]

@Lucleonhart:

Are you running a bare command line version op Linux, or are you running X / GUI?

My advice is too to run without X / GUI; X is a resource junk beast.

[Lucleonhart]

@sander: I am running command line version of debian squeeze.
SabNZB is using 80% of CPU while loading but i still got the problem that the system hangs after some seconds... Damn.

[sander]

@sander: I am running command line version of debian squeeze.
SabNZB is using 80% of CPU while loading but i still got the problem that the system hangs after some seconds... Damn.

Strange: I've got a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with 237 MB RAM (plus swap, which is unused), and that runs Ubuntu Server + SABnzbd without problems.

The VPS has a much faster CPU (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07GHz) than the RasPi, but that's not an explanation for your crashes.

Normally I would advice to run memtest86 to check memory stability, but the "86" in memtest86 probably means its for xxx86 processors and thus not ARM.

[Lucleonhart]

Well, i am really running out of ideas.
I tried different Distributions (Debian, Raspbian, Raspbmc) and differnt SD Cards to boot from.
I added configuration for Keeping the memory clear...

No luck. System hangs after a minute or two of downloading.
Before i start the download it runs perfectly.

[sander]

Well, i am really running out of ideas.
I tried different Distributions (Debian, Raspbian, Raspbmc) and differnt SD Cards to boot from.
I added configuration for Keeping the memory clear...

No luck. System hangs after a minute or two of downloading.
Before i start the download it runs perfectly.

Well, an application can't hang / crash a good OS on good hardware. That means if an application can hang / crash the system, there is a problem in the OS or in the hardware (meaning: no good OS and/or no good hardware).
So I would say it's not a SABnzbd problem, but it's something that is triggered by SAB. So, for example, a high CPU load, high network usage, high FS usage, or a high memory usage.

Is it just the download that causes the hang, or is the par2/unrar alread happening?

If you generate a high network load with "wget ftp://ftp.xs4all.nl/pub/test/100mb.bin", what happens?
What happens when you manually par2 and unrar a set of files?

EDIT:

And what if you limit the download speed to - for example - only 0.1 MBs (=1 Mbps)?

[Lucleonhart]

Hey sander! Thanks for the ideas, will try them out later. Currently installing arch linux, all others were debian distros and will use another version of sab.
Afterwards i will try your ideas.
Thanks again!

One intersting thing is: I can playback 1080p movies from a network drive without any problems, but download anything crashes the system. crazy. ^^

[Lucleonhart]

Okay, now i got some more info. Arch does not crash, it kills sab and tells me why! Stupid debian.

alarmpi kernel: Out of memory: Kill process 1785 (SABnzbd.py) sco re 660 or sacrifice child
Jun 7 19:12:19 alarmpi kernel: Killed process 1785 (SABnzbd.py) total-vm:390484k B, anon-rss:84860kB, file-rss:112kB

Any tips how to decrement the memory usage or to get linux to do that in a correct way?
Thanks for all your help!

[sander]

Interesting. As said: SABnzbd runs fine on my VPS with 235 MB RAM. However: my VPS has swap, and I think your RasPi hasn't because it has no harddisk. You could try try create a swap on your flash disk, and then swapon it. It will be slow, but it might prevent the crashed.

And: you're running couchpotato too? Maybe first limit the number of programs running.

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sander@toverdoos:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           237        231          6          0         38         54
-/+ buffers/cache:        137         99
Swap:          511          7        504
sander@toverdoos:~$
sander@toverdoos:~$ top -bn1 | grep -e USER -e nzbd
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  684 sander    20   0  389m  28m 2516 S    0 11.8   6:57.07 sabnzbdplus
sander@toverdoos:~$

[Lucleonhart]

Yes, now we are getting somewhere!
Ok, system runs without crashing or killing tasks... but is reaaaaally slow.

I am trying some tweaks now. ^^
Using the 07RC2 now, i hope this has no memory leaks.

Thank you for your help sander! Really appreciate. ^_^

New details:

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[root@alarmpi ~]# free -h
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          120M        80M        39M         0B        80K        10M
-/+ buffers/cache:        70M        50M
Swap:         421M        57M       363M

I have limited the download speed to 500kb so the system is a little bit more accessible. The speed varies between 100 and 500kb/s now.

[sander]

"Mem: 120M " ... what?!

The RasPi has 256 MB RAM ... why do you have only 120 MB RAM available?

There is one thing I can think of: you've given the other 136 MB RAM to the GPU. Which is nonsense if you run CLI and no GUI. So ... can that be the case?

EDIT: there is some text-config file that is used how to configure memory between CPU and GPU. Find that file, and correct it.

EDIT 2: see http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 21&p=77435 and http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 89&p=78974

[Lucleonhart]

Hey again.
Nice find, i will have a look at it.

Over all the system is very VERY slow and downloaded 200MB over two hours.
I wont imagine what will happen when the unpacking starts, but i will try and let you know!