Hi Guys. Currently, my Raspberry Pi 4 is only running Home Assistant OS, which works quite well. In the last few weeks, I have grown more and more interested in paperless ngx and Nextcloud. Do you think my pi would be able to handle home automation and some light document management simultaneously? If so, should I install a fresh version of Raspbian or let HA-OS handle the Docker containers?

Thanks for your answers, and have a wonderful day :)

  • drugo@lemmy.drugo.meEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    It’s probably going to be ok to scope them out and experiment a bit, but I doubt you’ll get enough performance and stability to run it as production. Paperless’ OCR is quite heavy on the CPU - iirc you can disable it but then you lose half of what makes it useful, and Nextcloud also does some processing to files that are uploaded to it. Since you are not running pi-hole or other latency-sensitive services it will probably be fine, it will just get sluggish while it processes uploads.

    • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      While paperless processing is indeed quite intensive, it’s not like this is a latency-sensitive task. If it takes 5m to OCR a scan, so be it. That doesn’t make it unusably slow.

      • drugo@lemmy.drugo.meEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        What I meant is that overloading the CPU on a Raspberry running pi-hole will make the whole network misbehave and timeout, until DNS requests are able to be serviced again. But since they’re not doing that it should be fine :)

        • Lennard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          It’s there any way around this? I don’t want my smart home applications to run sluggish. They need to have priority.

            • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Scheduling priority on Linux is borderline broken. Nice doesn’t even do anything noticeable on modern systems.

          • drugo@lemmy.drugo.meEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I would say not in a way that makes sense, there may be hacky workarounds like setting nice priorities or messing around with scheduling, but there’s no way around hardware limitations. The Pi’s CPU, RAM, and IO bandwidth are what they are, and you need overhead to guarantee “snappiness”

    • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.meEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      iirc you can disable it but then you lose half of what makes it useful,

      It depends on your scanner, mine does OCR with good quality, so I simply disabled paperless OCR.

      I agree with your comment in general, for a single user server that should just about work okay.

      • Lennard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Can you tell me a good scanner with integrated OCR? I used to love vflat, but they took a dark turn with a pricey subscription plan

        • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.meEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I have the Canon imageFORMULA p-208II. The Scanner software has the UX of a rack (or TX, for tortured experience), but otherwise I’m very happy with it.