Why is my Pi2 slower than my Acer one?

[PicoPi]

Hi all,
I am playing around with my new Pi2 and noticed right away, that it's very slow when surfing.
Tried iceweasel and chrome. The same.
I had an Acer one netbook that worked nicely with the win xp on it. It had slow celeron processor and 1 gb ram.
Its hard drive was probably a lot slower that the lexar class 14 (write= 14MB/S, read=27MB/S) sd card on my Pi2.
Why is that? The ram is faster, it's a quad core and has a faster disk!
I am thinking the ARM7 is only good for embedded apps not for fast gui response and general use.
For example, when I bring up ice weasel for the first time, it takes a long time. When I close the windows and open it up again, it takes the same time and sometimes even longer!
It goes back to the sd card and reloads the whole thing, over again. As if there was no cache.
I increased the shared ram to the GPU to 256M and didn't notice any change!
Is there a program somewhere I can assign some of the ram as cpu cache? Like the old dos ramdisk? but for CPU cache?
Can some one take the time to point me to the right direction as to where I may find the answers? Or please post a detailed reply for other noobs like me, looking to ask the same questions.
Thanks

[kusti8]

The Pi was never meant to be a desktop replacement and is going to be slower many computers. It is quad core, but the CPU on your computer is much faster, plus Iceweasel is not optimized to use the GPU, no browsers are.

[jbeale]

Modern web pages are designed with modern computers in mind. The RPi is the cheapest "general purpose" computer on the market. I have done a lot of things with it, but when I want to web surf, I go to my laptop. (It does work acceptably with simple web pages, it's just that most of the web isn't like that.)

In fact I think the Pi could perform better if it had software that took full advantage of its hardware, but RPi is leveraging the general Linux stuff that isn't tuned for the device.

[PicoPi]

Thanks guys for clearing that up.
I would ask then, what does it excel at?

[fruitoftheloom]

Hi all,
I am playing around with my new Pi2 and noticed right away, that it's very slow when surfing.
Tried iceweasel and chrome. The same.
I had an Acer one netbook that worked nicely with the win xp on it. It had slow celeron processor and 1 gb ram.
Its hard drive was probably a lot slower that the lexar class 14 (write= 14MB/S, read=27MB/S) sd card on my Pi2.
Why is that? The ram is faster, it's a quad core and has a faster disk!
I am thinking the ARM7 is only good for embedded apps not for fast gui response and general use.
For example, when I bring up ice weasel for the first time, it takes a long time. When I close the windows and open it up again, it takes the same time and sometimes even longer!
It goes back to the sd card and reloads the whole thing, over again. As if there was no cache.
I increased the shared ram to the GPU to 256M and didn't notice any change!
Is there a program somewhere I can assign some of the ram as cpu cache? Like the old dos ramdisk? but for CPU cache?
Can some one take the time to point me to the right direction as to where I may find the answers? Or please post a detailed reply for other noobs like me, looking to ask the same questions.
Thanks

The standard Epiphany Web Browser in Raspbian OS is OK if are patient

Kweb seems slighter better, but as others has pointed out it was not designed as a Windows 7 desktop replacement, it is for learning that there is computing beyod point and clicking a mouse...

viewtopic.php?f=66&t=40860

[fruitoftheloom]

Thanks guys for clearing that up.
I would ask then, what does it excel at?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/about


https://www.raspberrypi.org/the-magpi-i ... e-in-print

[kusti8]

Thanks guys for clearing that up.
I would ask then, what does it excel at?

Teaching people to code.

[PicoPi]

I picked the right board then
Was happy with Arduino and I think I'll be happier with my Pi2
Gotta go. My Pi is getting cold.

[PicoPi]

Hi all,
I am playing around with my new Pi2 and noticed right away, that it's very slow when surfing.
...
Thanks

The standard Epiphany Web Browser in Raspbian OS is OK if are patient

Kweb seems slighter better, but as others has pointed out it was not designed as a Windows 7 desktop replacement, it is for learning that there is computing beyod point and clicking a mouse...

viewtopic.php?f=66&t=40860

I installed it and its super fast. Thanks for the info.

[DougieLawson]

I picked the right board then
Was happy with Arduino and I think I'll be happier with my Pi2
Gotta go. My Pi is getting cold.

You can use your RPi in tandem with your Arduino. The Arduino IDE runs well on Raspbian. The Arduino also appears as a serial device so it's easy to run a python (or other) program on your RPi that reads/writes data from/to your Arduino.

[PicoPi]

I picked the right board then
Was happy with Arduino and I think I'll be happier with my Pi2
Gotta go. My Pi is getting cold.

You can use your RPi in tandem with your Arduino. The Arduino IDE runs well on Raspbian. The Arduino also appears as a serial device so it's easy to run a python (or other) program on your RPi that reads/writes data from/to your Arduino.

I had the same thing in mind. The Arduino can do the mundane and real-time stuff, while the monster does other crunchy things like video capture and processing.

[DougieLawson]

I had the same thing in mind. The Arduino can do the mundane and real-time stuff, while the monster does other crunchy things like video capture and processing.

That's precisely how they're used. There's even three Arduino clones that sit on the GPIO pins of your RPi. Those are the Gertduino, the Arduberry and the RaspIO Duino.

[jbeale]

The pi is good for learning several different kinds of programming. My 7-yo likes to play Minecraft on it.
The small size / low cost makes it easy to do some monitoring or data-acquisition projects, eg. outdoors where you wouldn't want to risk something more expensive.
I often use it together with an Arduino which does simple real-time stuff and analog input, then serial/USB to the Pi which does more calculations and wifi / network to a remote host.

The "killer app" for me personally is using the camera board add-on, as a highly configurable remote camera system. Check out
viewtopic.php?f=43&t=63276 for a convenient way to get started with the camera.

I've got a few of them running just to keep an eye on the house, and a 24/7 fileserver using less power than a big PC.
Overall I think the Pi is a fun and accessible tool for exploring possibilities.

[PicoPi]

The pi is good for learning several different kinds of programming. ...
The "killer app" for me personally is using the camera board add-on, as a highly configurable remote camera system. Check out
viewtopic.php?f=43&t=63276 for a convenient way to get started with the camera.

I've got a few of them running just to keep an eye on the house, and a 24/7 fileserver using less power than a big PC.
Overall I think the Pi is a fun and accessible tool for exploring possibilities.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

[PicoPi]

When I build the house with my own both hands 5 years ago, I wanted to automate it some day. That's why I ran a 7 strand cable (3 power and a pair of twisted and shielded pair.
Next project will be a uav drone that is dispatched by the Pi2 to a gps location for remote viewing and recognition
MAD you say? First order of business, is to learn python! LOL...

[1775]

The browsers in Raspbian are very slow. Try Ubuntu Mate 15.04 which takes advantage of the improvements in the Pi2 and has regular Firefox included. It runs much faster and Firefox runs much better than Iceweasal, Chrome, or the stock browser in Raspbian.

[PicoPi]

The browsers in Raspbian are very slow. Try Ubuntu Mate 15.04 which takes advantage of the improvements in the Pi2 and has regular Firefox included. It runs much faster and Firefox runs much better than Iceweasal, Chrome, or the stock browser in Raspbian.

Tried Ubuntu mate. Horribly slow in everything.
The only way to run firfox and chrome and not go crazy, is to run the chrome in "incognito" mode and make changes to the firefox config regarding cache and some other stuff I don't remember. I found it through Googling.
Minimal Kiosk is the fastest I've come across. A bit weird and not useful with youtube, but fast as a jack rabbit.
I needed a browser to look-up docs and code snippets during coding, and be able to cut and paste, which I can not do running back to my desktop.
Thanks for the input.

[jamesh]

Won't be much difference between Mate and Raspbian - moving to the Armv7 specific instructions doesn't make a huge difference unless the code takes advantage of the NEON stuff.