How much can a 2GB Raspberry Pi handle? I put it to the ultimate test

With the release of a variant of the Raspberry Pi with 2GB of RAM, a board that costs $10 less than the one with 4GB of RAM, people have been asking the predictable question — is 2GB of RAM enough?

As with most things, it depends on what you intend to do with it.

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I pitted a new 2GB Raspberry Pi against 4GB and 8GB boards. Hardware-wise, apart from the RAM capacity and the fact that the 2GB variant uses the new D0 processor stepping, they are identical.

At first blush, I didn’t see a lot of difference. All three showed boot times of about 22 seconds, and all three consumed about the same amount of RAM on a cold boot restart — with the 2GB board using the most, at about 630MB, while the 4GB and 8GB boards both hovered around the 570MB mark.

Load times for the various bundled apps were also functionally identical. While I could see fractions of a second difference in timing how long apps took to load, all three felt the same.

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I even ran a processor-intensive password-cracking utility called Hashcat on the three Raspberry Pi boards and got similar timings (and heat generation by the board under load).

That’s when I pulled out the big guns — the thing that can bring the mightiest computer to its knees.

Web browser tabs.

This is when the differences — and the cracks in the power of the 2GB Raspberry Pi — started to show.

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Using Firefox and the Chromium browser, I decided to see how many of the world’s most popular websites I could open simultaneously.

By the time I had five sites loaded on the 2GB board, it was starting to sweat and lag, and when it hit the 10-tab mark, it was pretty much unusable, while the 4GB and 8GB boards continued to handle this load well.

I pushed on further, but by the time I had 18 tabs open, the 2GB had given up and locked up. The 4GB board struggled a bit here, while the 8GB board was coping well with the load.

Pushing things further, the 4GB board became unresponsive at the 30-tabs mark, and the 8GB board was starting to lag.  

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I pulled the plug at the 40-tab point, with the 8GB board still running, but it was starting to creak noticeably under the load.

Is this a realistic test? No, not at all, and it’s hardly rocket science — bottom line, more RAM makes handling RAM-intensive tasks easier!

So, which board do you need?

Also: How I solved one of my biggest Raspberry Pi headaches

If you’re certain that you’re not doing much in the way of RAM-intensive tasks, saving the $10 could be false economy, and for the really demanding tasks, you’ll be better off going for the 8GB Raspberry Pis.

Think of the 4GB Raspberry Pi as the mainstream choice, the 2GB for lighter, less demanding workloads, and the 8GB as the choice to handle everything a Raspberry Pi can handle.