Running on RaspberryPi

[sander]

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!

Yep ... the reviews so far complain about the RasPi's slowness. For example a web page that takes 30 seconds to load ...

My RasPi is still in the mail, or yet has to be manufactered.

[Lucleonhart]

I hope you will receive it soon!
Like i said before: Fantastic smooth playback of 1080p Video material, the whole xbmc media center works really great...
Very interesting device to play around with. ^^

[sander]

I hope you will receive it soon!
Like i said before: Fantastic smooth playback of 1080p Video material, the whole xbmc media center works really great...
Very interesting device to play around with. ^^

Yep, the video play is directly to the GPU.

Do you run XMBC? Hasn't that a graphical interface? If so, is it based on X, or something more light weight?

[Lucleonhart]

Uh... i do not know if it is based on x... i think they build their own engine. The Gui is rendered by the CPU (you see that it is under high load when navigating the menu) but is it perfectly smooth because of the "dirty region" rendering where only the changing parts are rendered.

So i changed the ram spilt between CPU and GPU... now it downloads for about 5 minutes with very good speed and all, but after that the ram is eaten by sab, too and it is the same as before...
No luck so far. ^^

[sander]

How does nzbget behave?

[davo7135]

I was having some similar issues with larger (2gb+) downloads having very inconsistent speeds, followed by hang ups.

I'm new to linux so I haven't delved into error logs but I have had some success with the following:
-- Really cutting back on the number of connections. I have 3 to my main server, with 1 connection each to my backups

-- Using a program called cpulimit, and limiting sab to 85%. This seems to stop it from spiking to 100% and locking up my pi

-- Using a version of SAB found here: http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/install-ubuntu-repo

-- Disable download while unpacking in the settings

I haven't tried changing the RAM split yet, thanks for the heads up with that one.

I'm still testing and I don't know how much of what I have done is inconsequential, but it might work for you too.
Good luck

Ps. Max internet speed for me is like 500kB, with my Pi easily staying stable at 400kB. This may be what you consider slow, but it works for me.

Addendum: With some tweaking, I'm getting 480-520kb stable on a 3.5gb file, with 90% in cpulimit, 224mb RAM and 4 connections to my main server. This is maxing my connection so I cant push it any further. Now to let it run for long periods of time and see how it goes.

[sander]

cpulimit looks useful in general, and especially for SABnzbd on low-cpu-spec systems. Thank you for your info.

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EXAMPLES
       Assuming  you  have started `foo --bar` and you find out with top(1) or
       ps(1) that this process uses all your CPU time you can either

       # cpulimit -e foo -l 50
              limits the CPU usage of the process by acting on the  executable
              program file (note: the argument "--bar" is omitted)

       # cpulimit -p 1234 -l 50
              limits  the  CPU  usage  of the process by acting on its PID, as
              shown by ps(1)

       # cpulimit -P /usr/bin/foo -l 50
              same as -e but uses the absolute path name

[davo7135]

Some results from last night:
I downloaded multiple 3gb+ files for stress testing, which is more than I usually ever would.
No crashes from the raspberry pi, something it couldn't do before.

Settings: 224mb RAM split, 4 connections, limited to 90% cpulimit

Average speed: 430kB
Unpack time: ~40 minutes each
Repair time: 1 hour (for one)

Certainly not fast, but if it is all automated with couchpotato and sickbeard it hardly makes a difference to me. Big downloads I need straight away I will still use my main computer.
I haven't looked into cpulimiting the unrar and par2 etc commands, but ill have to keep a close eye on them to see if they cause issues.

I definitely think strict cpulimit controls may be the answer to keeping the pi stable (in this and other things), along with being frugal with what to expect out of the pi given its specs and power usage.

-- I put this into the sabnzbd init.d file, created by my aforementioned unofficial repo install:
cpulimit -z -p $(cat /var/run/sabnzbdplus.pid) -l 90 >/dev/null 2>%1 &

Hope it helps

[sander]

davo7135, Lucleonhart,

How did you install SABnzbd on the raspi. Today I got a Raspi from a friend, and the Raspi is now running the Debian version of April.

A "sudo apt-get install sabnzbdplus" gives an error, so do I have to enable repositories?

[davo7135]

Short version of how I did it:
Use this to add unofficial repositories: http://blog.anantshri.info/howto-add-ppa-in-debian/
then use this to add the sabnzbd repo: http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/install-ubuntu-repo

I'm not really quite sure of the implications of adding additional repositories, and it is an older version of SAB.. But it has been working really well for me (now with sickbeard), so I'm happy, and happy with my purchase

[sander]

Short version of how I did it:
Use this to add unofficial repositories: http://blog.anantshri.info/howto-add-ppa-in-debian/
then use this to add the sabnzbd repo: http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/install-ubuntu-repo

I'm not really quite sure of the implications of adding additional repositories, and it is an older version of SAB.. But it has been working really well for me (now with sickbeard), so I'm happy, and happy with my purchase

Thank you. I'll try that. In the meantime I had found and tried a non-PPA method: http://packages.debian.org/nl/squeeze/sabnzbdplus says sabnzbdplus is in 'contrib', so I added a repository line with contrib to /etc/apt/sources.list. That worked, althoug I now have a stone old SAB: 0.5.4 ... Debian really focuses on stable ...

[sander]

Short version of how I did it:
Use this to add unofficial repositories: http://blog.anantshri.info/howto-add-ppa-in-debian/
then use this to add the sabnzbd repo: http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/install-ubuntu-repo

I'm not really quite sure of the implications of adding additional repositories, and it is an older version of SAB.. But it has been working really well for me (now with sickbeard), so I'm happy, and happy with my purchase

Cool, that works.

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pi@raspberrypi:~$ wget http://blog.anantshri.info/content/uploads/2010/09/add-apt-repository.sh.txt
--2012-06-14 07:34:41--  http://blog.anantshri.info/content/uploads/2010/09/add-apt-repository.sh.txt
Resolving blog.anantshri.info... 108.162.199.165, 108.162.199.65
Connecting to blog.anantshri.info|108.162.199.165|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/plain]
Saving to: `add-apt-repository.sh.txt'

    [ <=>                                                                                                  ] 745         --.-K/s   in 0s      

2012-06-14 07:34:42 (8.99 MB/s) - `add-apt-repository.sh.txt' saved [745]

pi@raspberrypi:~$ cp add-apt-repository.sh.txt /usr/sbin/add-apt-repository
cp: cannot create regular file `/usr/sbin/add-apt-repository': Permission denied
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo cp add-apt-repository.sh.txt /usr/sbin/add-apt-repository
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo chmod o+x /usr/sbin/add-apt-repository
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo chown root:root /usr/sbin/add-apt-repository
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jcfp/ppa
jcfp/ppa
Executing: gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /etc/apt/secring.gpg --trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --primary-keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys F13930B14BB9F05F
gpg: requesting key 4BB9F05F from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key 4BB9F05F: public key "Launchpad PPA for jcfp" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo apt-get update

I'm now running SABnzbd 0.7.0 on my Raspi with Debian (Linux raspberrypi 3.1.9+ #90 Wed Apr 18 18:23:05 BST 2012 armv6l GNU/Linux)

FWIW /etc/apt/sources.list now contains the following line:

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deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jcfp/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

So Debian Squeeze is equivalent to Ubuntu Lucid?

[davo7135]

Update after a few days of running, everything is smooth with sab and sick beard up and running, with couch potato soon to follow. everything is stable, no system lock ups. On the odd occasion it seemed that either sab or sick beard would crash, but this seemed to be more due to web requests to their servers. To fix this I have a program called monit watching them and restart them on fail. This is in addition to tight cpulimit settings and experimenting with renice. Not sure what I'm doing a lot of the time but it has worked for me so far.

[zapt0]

I have gotten SABnzbd to run well with Debian Wheezy beta release - here is the basic configuration:
- Compile native yEnc (Important, otherwise load will be very high!) - See tutorial below.
- At least 256MB swap on SD card. (You don't want to swap, but in case you need it it should be available)
- 32M Article Cache Limit (You can use 64M or even more - which lowers the load, but I found the pi occasionally starts to swap with this setting.)
- Enable "Pause Downloading During Post-Processing"

The base tutorial I used was the one one for CentOS 5:
http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/install-centos54

Some notes:
- You need python-devel package to compile yEnc, install with:
apt-get install python2.7-dev
- Load is about ~1.5-2.0 when downloading at ~800KB from SSL-enabled server.

Haven't needed cpulimit but seems like it could be a good addition.

[niko86]

- Compile native yEnc (Important, otherwise load will be very high!) - See tutorial below.

Some notes:
- You need python-devel package to compile yEnc, install with:
apt-get install python2.7-dev
- Load is about ~1.5-2.0 when downloading at ~800KB from SSL-enabled server.

Haven't needed cpulimit but seems like it could be a good addition.

I thought yEnc was included as a dependency, I already have python-yEnc package. Or is it a different version I need?