I am running piaware with a FlightAware Pro Stick Plus and I was curious if replacing the older Raspberry Pi 2B with a newer Raspberry Pi 4 would result in a higher message or aircraft rate than what I am seeing now?
It does not look like the CPU is pegged or anything, but I was not sure if there would be any advantage to upgrade the CPU? Does the fact that I am using an EDIMAX USB wifi connection influence the overall performance?
It may be possible to get better performance with an RPI4.
On the older models, the ethernet, USB, WiFi and SD card all share a USB 2.0 bus.
I think the SD card and ethernet are separated on the RPI4.
Also, the graphs don’t tell the whole story. They are normally 60/300 second or 1/5 minute polls. A lot can happen in 1-5 minutes.
You may be better off with tuning the gain settings, trying a filter or a better filter, raising the antenna or using better coax. Can you provide more details of your setup?
A pi 2 is perfectly adequate to run an rtl dongle. You won’t see any performance improvement by just changing to a pi 4. I was using a pi 2 and seeing message rates up to 1600/s with 250 aircraft. Changing to a pi 4 made no difference whatsoever to that.
You can see from the CPU graph, that the ADS-B CPU utilisation is only about 25%, so has plenty to spare.
A pi 4 is worthwhile if you are going to be doing something more demanding - for example running an airspy dongle, or if you want to run something like VRS or flightairmap.
I am using RPi 2B+ heavily as shown below, but cpu usage is quiet low (please see screenshot below).
Antenna-1 >> dvbt-1 >> dump1090-1 >> port 30005 >> feeders-1 to multiple sites.
Antenna-2 >> dvbt-2 >> dump1090-2 >> port 31005 >> feeders-2 to multiple sites.
