Anthias 2026.07.1 renders pi 3B+ unusable

Anthias
1

We have a simple little Anthias installation on a 1GB Raspberry Pi 3B+. It has been working fine for many months, but the most recent automatic update bricked it.

All we’re doing is running a very simple schedule that just cycles between a few basic web pages that display a few images. This acts as a status board for our office.

When I arrived at the office this morning, it was just sitting on a black screen, and was unresponsive on the web UI. After rebooting it, I was able to get into the web UI, but once it started running through the scheduled items, I could see that it was basically running out of memory, with very little free space available. CPU load was showing about 9 (yes, 9), which makes me think it was thrashing.

I initially tried a fresh install using the Raspberry Pi Imager, just to make sure there wasn’t a problem with the installation, but this produced the same results.

Long story short, the solution was to do a clean Pi OS Lite installation, then install v2026.05.2. I initially tried to install one of the 2026.6.x releases, but the issues with the install scripts on those were giving me grief so I rolled back a bit farther.

After rebuilding my schedule, I can see that I now have a reasonable amount of free memory again (I think over 100MB), and CPU load seems to be hanging out between 0.2 and 0.6 depending on the complexity of the page it’s loading.

So I’m not sure what changed in this latest release, but it does seem to render this particular Pi configuration unusable. We’ve pinned our Pi to v2026.05.2 now.

Also, is it a known issue that the button that is supposed to write out a copy of your settings and assets writes an empty tarball? We don’t have any local assets on the Pi, since everything is loaded via URL, but I did expect that it would write out my settings and schedule. It did not, so I had to rebuild that from scratch.

2

We’re actively working on improving the performance on the Pi 3. There are some improvements in committed since the last release even.

Tl;dr is that QT6, which is the core dependency, doesn’t really play ball with 1GB of RAM out of the box. Older versions were running QT5, which is end-of-life, but doesn’t consume as much memory but doesn’t have as modern browser.

3

Appreciate the info. I will leave our unit pinned to the older version.

As a suggestion, if there are serious known issues like this, it might be nice to not auto-update devices that are going to halt and catch fire after the update. This cost us several hours of effort to troubleshoot and restore functionality. Providing an option in the web GUI to disable auto-update would have saved a lot of time as well. I could have pulled down a known-good image, turned off auto-update, and been good to do quite quickly compared to having to do a Pi OS Lite install and then the install script.

Thanks again.

4

That’s not possible with the way the infrastructure is set up for Anthias. You can however do that if you self-install. It’s also important to stress that Anthias isn’t provided with any warranties.

If your signage is business critical, we recommend you switch to Screenly, where we do provide guarantees and support.

5

Should be resolved in 2026.07.2.