Reliability of RaspberryPi vs. Desktop

[firemun]

I am thinking of switching my feed from a desktop over to a pi feed. Audio is from a dedicated scanner and I have no plan to use SDR. I am wondering how the reliability compares between the two. I have had occasional issues with the desktop that requires reboots etc. I finally put the desktop on a timer that reboots it every night. But still sometimes it behaves like Windows is known to behave and it take manual intervention. So my questions are
1) is the pi based feed pretty reliable and consistent?
2) assuming it occasionally hiccups, would the timer solution to force a restart be a good idea?
Thanks!

 

[Thunderknight]

While not used for streaming, but I have Pi’s running without reboot for over a year at a time.
If you wanted it to reboot daily, a one line cronjob will make that easy and automatic.

 

[cmjonesinc]

Also not streaming a feed but I have a pi zero that has been running for well over a year now with zero restarts. Also have a pi3 running a flightradar24 feed for a long while with zero problems. I would recommend a good quality SD card to prevent premature failure.

 

[Enjoi19]

I’ve had a pi running with minimal reboots (maybe 4 total) for about 2 years. It’s even running off a PoE switch. Seems fine. Keep a backup SD card handy

 

[techman210]

The Pi is pretty bulletproof- once it’s been running successfully, make an image file of it, just in case something bad happens.

 

[vagrant]

I have six different Pi 3B+ and most need rebooting within 30 days. They run various OS versions or custom images and the memory loss eventually locks them up. As previously noted, an edit of the crontab handles the monthly reboot and checks to run scripts to start some processes after the reboot.

 

[Kingscup]

I have been streaming my RPi for the last 5 years and it has been rock solid. It has never gone down on its own. Usually it is the internet that goes down and I need to reboot to get the feed running properly again.

 

[DC31]

Raspberry Pi Darkice streaming made easy

I have put together an SD card image for a Raspberry Pi which should work "out of the box" to set up a pi for streaming. You will need a Pi3 or earlier. It will not work on a pi4 as it is based on Raspbian Stretch Lite and the 4 requires Buster. Darkice requires pretty minimal CPU resources...

forums.radioreference.com

it is quite interesting reading about people’s experiences! I agree, rock solid.

 

[a417]

desktop <snip>(vs) pi feed.<snip> I have had occasional issues with the desktop that requires reboots etc. I finally put

The problem is usually resultant of the software used/configuration - not the hardware. Good software makes hardware look like a champ, bad software makes you hate everything.

I have absolutely BEAT on some original Pi 1Bs, 2's and 3s over the last 7+ years and (taking SD card death out of the equation / and careful changes to runtime configs), they are simply rock solid. I have a battery-backed up one in my garden in an epoxied tupperware going on 3+ years of uptime.

 

[vagrant]

Indeed...indeed. Wonky code with leaks are not my friend. I suffer with timed reboots and RTC's on some Pi's without access to an NTP server (Internet).

The problem is usually resultant of the software used/configuration - not the hardware.

 

[hockeyref2]

If possible, boot from USB and use a SSD... I have had too many "high quality" SD cards die

 

[boatbod]

Linux systems typically run for weeks/months without needing a reboot. Try that with Windows and see how far you get!
On the RPi, probably the main thing to do is disable power management of the wifi hardware (if you are using wifi) because when it goes to sleep the machine can become inaccessible. It's pretty easy to do and you should find the instructions fairly easily with just a quick google search.

 

[a417]

If possible, boot from USB and use a SSD... I have had too many "high quality" SD cards die

Best feature addition of 2B v1.2 firmware if you ask me. All the 1s and 1Bs I have dutifully doing stuff wish they could do that.