[arm-allstar] Pi 2/3 Capacity

[Doug Crompton]

Lee,

  The pi3 is a pretty powerful device. The limitation is USB bandwidth. It
will handle two radio nodes fine but I would not go beyond that at least
not with the current code. We are working on making the code more efficient
all the time and there is a possibility that more than two could be used in
the future especially with our new IOpipe channel driver.

I run a non radio hub here that sometimes has 30-40 connections with a
Broadcastify link and Echolink and it loafs so connections are not a
problem as long as you have the Internet bandwidth. That hub also supports
3 other nodes with traffic but no radios. If you are running a hub with
many connections I would recommend not connecting any USB radio nodes.

Personally in most cases I would run one board per radio node and that is
the way I do it here. The boards are cheap and having everything running on
one board just leads to complexity and less redundancy. Lets say you had a
two repeater site. Yes one board could handle controlling the two repeaters
and Allstar connections but what if that board failed? Now you have lost
everything. If you used one board per repeater or per node that would not
happen. This is kind of a reverse of the standard repeater controller. In
that case you have one controller and you add ports. In the Allstar case
each board is a controller and port and you add the controllers together
via Ethernet. There also is no requirement you be connected to the
Internet. Of course you would lose Allstar connectivity but you would still
have repeater controller capability. You could also create your own private
network.



*73 Doug*

*WA3DSP*

*http://www.crompton.com/hamradio <http://www.crompton.com/hamradio>*

On Sat, Mar 4, 2017 at 1:47 PM, "Lee Woldanski via arm-allstar" <
arm-allstar at hamvoip.org> wrote:

> Hello folks,
>
> Has anyone torture tested the Pi 2/3 to see how many simultaneous
> connections it can effectively handle?
>
> Will they handle connecting 4 USB FOBs to them to say a couple repeaters
> and a couple links, all running concurrently?
>
> Just trying to figure out how to best re-build an existing system and
> whether to dedicate a Pi to each machine, or just hook it all to one and
> go.
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> Lee
> --
> Lee Woldanski, AScT
> VE7FET
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