I’ve been banging my head against the wall getting Anthias working on a 3B+. It works, but only for a brief time before OOM’ing and locking up or other oddball stuff that seems like rampant performance problems.
Am I wasting my time trying to get this to work on a 3B+? Is this all lack of resources and should really be using a 4 or 5?
RPI 3B+ 1GB RAM to HDMI to 4k 60hz display. I am trying to display a Google Slides presentation with a presentation link.
Things I’ve found:
Google Slides transition animations burn down the Anthias instance very quickly and never display without lag. Removing them helped, but only extended the inevitable crash.
I forced the RPI to 1080p to the display via the cmdline.txt file. This helped the most, still a slow experience with load numbers in the 12-15 range.
Creating a second asset of the same slideshow, to have the webpage refresh (still Slides presentation) for updated content has crushed performance again and the slideshow never updates.
I’ve recreated the same 10 slide presentation in a new file and it made no difference.
The 10 slide presentation is images and text with a few native shapes added, no GIFs, no Videos, all the images are normal sized, etc.
I’ve tried several SD Cards to rule out IO problems, factory branded Raspbery Pi SD Cards and Sandisk Edge A1 card, neither made a difference.
I’ve tried multiple PI 3B+s with POE power and Micro USB power to rule out throttling or mischievous hardware. (all of these are brand new)
HTOP reveals that CPU usage is not high (single digit mostly) except for a blip here and there from the webserver. Memory usage hovers 700-750mb and eventually runs out (788mb avail total)
Adding a youtube video gets stuck at forever “processing”
Anthias uses Docker containers for its services. This includes the server (which provides the web UI and backend) and the viewer (which controls what content is displayed on a connected screen).
On a Raspberry Pi 3, performance limitations are unfortunately expected. The hardware is quite constrained by today’s standards, and containerization adds some overhead in exchange for portability and easier maintenance.
We understand that not everyone has the option to upgrade hardware (for example, moving to a Pi 4 or Pi 5), especially since Anthias is free and open source. At the same time, there is no known configuration today that reliably delivers smooth performance on a Pi 3 across all types of content.
In theory, a more lightweight setup that does not rely on containers could reduce overhead on very constrained devices like the Pi 3. This has not been tested, there is no proof of concept, and it is not something we currently support or recommend. It would fall into the category of community experimentation.
For now, the most practical mitigations on a Pi 3 are keeping content simple, lowering the output resolution, and avoiding web-heavy or animated assets. For new deployments, newer Pi models remain the recommended baseline.
As an alternative, Anthias can also be installed on older x86 machines, as long as they can run Debian 12. This can be a viable option if suitable Raspberry Pi hardware is not available. More details are available here: https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/blob/master/docs/x86-installation.md
We have five Pi 3B V 1.2 - each running a screen in our information area.
They run video files of the approved standard and have done so, rock solidly for more than six months.
Some of the people responsible for the content on each screen (different people with different skills for different screens) have tried doing other things - with little success. For instance, YouTube links have been tried a couple of times but have never worked.
As “project architect & tech support”, I advise them to use the approved video format and adapt to that.
My justification is that this project has already had a budget of £0. (The screens are all recycled.) If they want to do “sexy” stuff, it can be done - but will need a budget to cover Pi 4 4GB x number of screens.
At that point, standard video becomes a good option - even for the die hard Apple users amongst them.
