H3 or H5 Orange Pi for Java software

[kypa]

Hello!

Use case is mostly about turning the kitchen TV into a kitchen PC, with main purpose displaying some market charts while I'm cooking (doing this on a phone is a pain in the eyes). Someone might try eventually to browse facebooks or download movies on that TV, but that's not important.

Software displaying such charts available for Linux and ARM is mostly Java platforms (I believe Java is architecture-independent, the applications at least, but I might be wrong), using 300-800 MB RAM and 10-30% on a low-end x86 CPU.

The Orange Pi+ 2E seems like the best thing for such hobo desktop purpose, mostly because people's support for it, but the H5 SoC advertises some kind of Java hardware acceleration.

Considering what I've read about Xunlong's "marketing" in SBC-related forums (I searched for information before posting this, not much, but I did) I have to ask is it actually something usable (or even existing) and can it be relevant to my case? And if both are "yes" - does the A64 have it as well and does it depend on Mali drivers (I suppose that should be the main reason people mentioning H5 inventors' moms while writing images for it)?

 

[jkajolin]

All socks have terrible slow filesystems even 10 years old market pc runs faster.

Example linux swap is terrible slow from sd-card.

javas biggest problem is and has always been garbage collector it makes the software really cpu depended and on weak systems the performance is poor. 

 

For a pure performance I would go for the small size embedded pc's.

Java is reasonable if you have alot of memory, strong CPU and the application loads as match as possible at startup.

[tkaiser]

1 hour ago, jkajolin said:

All socks have terrible slow filesystems even 10 years old market pc runs faster

 

Don't agree here: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/1925-some-storage-benchmarks-on-sbcs/&do=findComment&comment=14802 (though: you get what you pay for, ODROID-C2 eMMC with larger sizes is pretty expensive)

 

As for the other requests: 'browse facebooks or download movies'... no idea whether that's on some SBC platforms ok-ish (I would not even try it) and regarding Java I've to admit that I learned to hate Java applications already 20 years ago too much (we had a Sun Enterprise 450 back then with just 256 MB RAM and a shitty Java application that needed +1 GB after a few hours swapping the machine to death)

 

 

[kypa]

These particular applications are supposed to be well written, one is Dukascopy's (big fat banking thieves, most definitely have money for software), one is Oanda's (little sneaky broker thieves, also have money for software), although I also hate to use them as they really are resource-hungry. The software I actually use takes like 100-300 MB RAM and 5-10% on same CPU, but is x86 dependent.

 

With 2 GB of RAM would the board really need swap? Even if intended to run 500+ MB demanding software? I have 3 and 4 GB RAM desktops running GNOME and KDE (I would probably put Xfce or LXDE on the SBC) and I've never used swap on them.

 

By "downloading a movie" I meant torrents (this is Bulgaria, we are illegal AF), which by the way might come close to the case for random 16 MB reads/writes from the eMMC tests, some torrents downloading at some speeds with some torrent client caching settings at least.

 

 

 

[kypa]

Initial loading/pseudo-installing of the platforms takes about half to one hour, second and later not much faster as well, even the one that uses all cores. After logging in end up with a network error instead of actual program loading (this should be fixable). So far so not good, the little thing is definitely not suited for this.

Android platforms worked fine though, browser based almost fine too.