RPi Memory Test

Raspberry Pi has an ARMv6 700 MHz single-core processor, a VideoCore IV GPU and 512MB of RAM. It uses an SD card for its operating system and data storage. The Raspberry Pi officially supports Raspbian, a lightweight linux OS based on Debian. A Raspberry Pi device has two processors: CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). You probably know that CPU is used for calculations and GPU is used graphical tasks, such as playing videos and games. The memory of your device is shared between these two processors. By default, 64MB of RAM is allocated for the GPU. If you use your Raspberry Pi for graphics-intensive work, you should increase the amount of RAM allocated to GPU to improve the performance. You can change the amount of memory available to the GPU in Raspberry Pi configuration file.

Note:

If you are not using graphics, you can decrease the amount of memory allocated for the GPU. This can be useful in situations when you are using your Raspberry Pi as a server and GUI is not needed.

If you experience memory contention in Raspberry Pi, you can use this test to find out whether the memory contention is caused due to insufficient memory allocation between CPU and GPU, since this test reveals the statistics related to the utilization of the main memory and GPU memory of the Raspberry Pi. Using the RPi Memory Test test, administrators may be proactively alerted to memory resource contention, if any.

Target of the test : A Raspberry Pi Device

Agent deploying the test : An external agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for the Raspberry Pi device is being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter Description

Test period

How often should the test be executed

Host

The IP address of the Raspberry Pi device that is being monitored.

Use Sudo

The eG agent runs native Linux commands to pull metrics from the Raspberry Pi system. By default, the eG agent does not require any special permissions to execute these commands. In some highly-secure Linux environments however, the eG agent install user may not have the permissions to execute these commands directly. To grant permission to eG agent install user for command execution, first, perform the following steps:

  • Edit the SUDOERS file on the target host and append an entry of the following format to it:

    <eG_agent_install_user> ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD

  • For instance, if the eG agent install user is eguser, then the entry in the SUDOERS file should be:

    eguser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD

  • Finally, save the file.

Then, when configuring this test using the eG admin interface, set the USE SUDO parameter to Yes. This will enable the eG agent to execute the Linux commands and retrieve the metrics.

Sudo Path

This parameter is relevant only when the USE SUDO parameter is set to ‘Yes’. By default, the SUDO PATH is set to none. This implies that the sudo command is in its default location – i.e., in the /usr/bin or /usr/sbin folder of the target host. In this case, once the Use Sudo flag is set to Yes, the eG agent automatically runs the sudo command from its default location. However, if the sudo command is available in a different location in your environment, you will have to explicitly specify the full path to the sudo command in the Sudo Path text box.
Measurements made by the test
Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation

Memory

Indicates the amount of memory split between the CPU and GPU of this device.

MB

To achieve the best results with your Raspberry Pi, try to go with optimum split of CPU and GPU memory based upon your Raspberry Pi version.