In my experience, one of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance is to buy the fastest possible microSD card—especially for applications where you need to do a lot of random reads and writes.
There is an order-of-magnitude difference between most cheap cards and the slightly-more-expensive ones (even if both are rated as being in the same class)—especially in small-block random I/O performance. As an example, if you use a normal, cheap microSD card for your database server, normal database operations can literally be 100x slower than if you used a standard microSD card.
Because of this, I went and purchased over a dozen different cards and have been putting them through their paces. Here are the results of those efforts...
Visit TFA for the full table. The overall winner seems to be OWC Envoy SSD (USB), with hdparm buffered: 34.13 MB/s; dd write: 34.4 MB/s; 4K rand read: 7.06 MB/s; 4K rand write: 8.20 MB/s
takyon: The value winner in the article is the Samsung Evo+ 32 GB (purchased for $9.99 from Best Buy) with decent/passable speeds.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday December 04 2015, @06:27PM
I would replace phys.org with Futurity [futurity.org].
Instead of linking directly to Futurity you can easily find the university websites the articles are sourced from. Phys.org is scummy by comparison and makes it difficult to find the original source.
In addition, the DOI and link to the scientific study is included at the bottom of the article where applicable (almost always).
The only problem is that you may need to Inspect Element to get the non-capslocked form of the Futurity headline, if you intend to use that.
Here is an example story:
http://www.futurity.org/orcas-whales-ships-speed-1062552-2/ [futurity.org]
http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/12/02/vessel-speed-biggest-factor-in-noise-affecting-killer-whales/ [washington.edu]
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0140119
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0140119 [plos.org]
Every scientific paper published should have a unique DOI identifier, which can be very useful when searching databases for the paper.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @10:43PM
> The only problem is that you may need to Inspect Element to get the non-capslocked form of the Futurity headline, if you intend to use that.
Copy-paste fixes it automagically for me. Which is to be expected since you can't paste a fontface into soylent.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 05 2015, @12:11AM
maybe it's up to how the browser handles text-transform: uppercase;
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]