I'm contemplating replacing my Pi 3 + StellarMate with a 4. Will plate solving, etc. function OK with 1 GB or am I better off with 2 or even 4? The 3 takes a long time to plate solve and often fails, so I have to use my laptop and suffer the download times.
I would recommend 2 GB at least. Sometimes on my raspberry Pi 3, it uses more than 1GB, so it goes in to the Zram swap. But with Zram enabled, there is no reason 2GB is not enough.
I would recommend the 4GB model simply because it doesn't cost that much more and you never know when the extra ram can come in handy. But 2GB works, and already a very worthwhile step up from the Pi3 with only 1GB.
Yep, to be fair, my advice was to get the 2GB version since that's all you should need memory-wise. However, I myself instead opted for the 4GB version, just because it was just a little more money. So you can do what I said or do what I did
I've never seen mine go over 2GB's more like 1.3GB's. I think if I had to buy a backup version it would be a 2GB version. But as Ihoujin said, it's not that much more. But you never know, someday they might open up that memory usage.
I wonder what will happen when (if) they go to 64bit vs the current 32bit. That might have nothing to do with memory usage though.
I am using the 4GB model and program memory usage frequently exceeds 2 GB, cache is using the rest. Even my 4 GB swap is being used occasionally, but not much.
I am not sure what the means, but why skimp on memory for $10 in savings or - rather - potential aggravation?
OK, that's pretty clear guidance. It wasn't just the dollar cost I was thinking of, but also potential power consumption and heat generation. That might be significant on a less-sophisticated board computer where the RAM is a bigger part of the budget for both, but thinking about what the Pi 4 is already packing, I bet the extra RAM 's power and heat is down in the noise.