I’ve found that my Pi 400’s built in web browser is almost unusable with bloaty script-heavy sites, so I’m wondering if the Pi 5 or 500+ is any better. There would be an NVMe SSD present if that helps.

If someone has this setup, could they take a look at homedepot.com ? That’s a very slow and obnoxious site that I use sometimes, as I do buy some from there when I can’t avoid it. I’m ok if it’s a bit sluggish but my Pi 400 was near incapable of navitation or loading the page in a reasonable amount of waiting.

Thanks!

  • Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    I’d find it odd if a RPi4 can’t smoothly run a browser :o

    You can use btop, to monitor if you have a bottleneck on your CPU or RAM, if Swap memory gets used, things will slow down, if your CPU is clocking @ 100%, same thing but not much you can do about that besides perhaps weeding out unnessecary processes that consume a lot, if there are any.

    In case your RAM is @ 100%, you could:

    • Use LibreWolf instead of FireFox,
      it’s an open source privacy focussed fork,
      which removes some of the FireFox bloaty stuff, which reduces RAM usage.
    • Use uBlock Origin, to block advertisements, which will reduce RAM usage and increase page load speeds
    • Use NoScript, to block JavaScript trackers, to further reduce RAM usage and increase page load speedd, beware, will block all JS by default, so sites will break, but can be manually fixed by re-enabling only the nessecary JS components on a site
    • Switch to DietPi, a very light weight RAM/CPU friendly distro for SBCs like RPis, I’ve used it only headless (without GUI) but it only used 50Mb of RAM out of the box last time I monitorred it, which is impressively low.
    • solrize@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Thanks, I actually never tried Firefox on my 400. I only tried the built-in Raspbian browser which I think might be Chromium based. The 400 has 4GB of ram which should really be enough to view any reasonable web page, I hope? I mean just the one page, not 100 open tabs at the same time. Anyway, the 500+ has 16GB of ram, and I browse a lot right now with an x86 laptop with 4GB. So whatever the problem with the 400 was, I don’t think it was ram per se. CPU too slow, SD card too low, browser too slow, some combination of the above.

      I got the 400 for purposes unrelated for browsing and it worked fine for that. I only tried browsing a few times and it was awful, so I just didn’t use it for that. But now I think of migrating from my laptop to a Pi 5 or 500, so have to ask about this.