How much can a 2GB Raspberry Pi handle? I put it to the ultimate test

With the release of a variant of the Raspberry Pi with 2GB RAM, a card that costs $10 less than the one with 4GB RAM, people have been asking the predictable question: is 2GB of RAM enough?

As with most things, it depends on what you plan to do with it.

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I pitted a new 2GB Raspberry Pi against 4GB and 8GB Boards. Apart from the RAM capacity and the fact that the 2GB variant uses the new D0 processor stepping, they are identical in terms of hardware.

At first glance, I couldn’t see much of a difference. All three showed a boot time of around 22 seconds, and all three used about the same amount of RAM on a cold boot – with the 2GB card using the most at around 630MB, while the 4GB and 8GB cards both came in at around 570MB.

The loading times of the various bundled apps were also functionally identical. Although I could see a split-second difference in how the apps loaded, it felt the same across all three apps.

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I even ran a processor-intensive password cracking utility called Hashcat on the three Raspberry Pi boards and got similar timings (and similar heat generated by the board under load).

That’s where I brought out the big guns – the thing that can bring the most powerful computer to its knees.

Tabs in the web browser.

This is where the differences and performance deficits of the 2 GB Raspberry Pi began to become apparent.

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Using Firefox and the Chromium browser, I wanted to see how many of the world’s most popular websites I could open at the same time.

By the time I had loaded five sites onto the 2GB card, it started to stutter and lag, and by the 10-tab mark it was virtually unusable, while the 4GB and 8GB cards continued to handle that load well.

I kept going, but by the time I had 18 tabs open, the 2GB card had given up and crashed. The 4GB card struggled a little here, while the 8GB card handled the load well.

To push things even further, at the 30 tab mark, the 4GB board stopped responding and the 8GB board started to weaken.

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I pulled the plug at 40 TB. The 8GB board was still working, but began to creak noticeably under the load.

Is this a realistic test? No, not at all, and it’s not rocket science either – the bottom line is that more RAM makes RAM-intensive tasks easier to handle!

So, which board do you need?

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If you’re sure you’re not going to be doing a lot of RAM-intensive tasks, saving $10 might be a false economy. For the really demanding tasks, you’re better off with the 8GB Raspberry Pis.

Think of the 4GB Raspberry Pi as the mainstream choice, the 2GB for lighter, less demanding workloads, and the 8GB as the choice for anything a Raspberry Pi can handle.