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I see @stkim1 is also the author of the blog. Performance-wise, how does this RPi cluster compare to a more standard platform? Did you make it only as a development platform or do you intend to have production code running in it?

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I've never imagined the RPI cluster to be taken seriously for production purpose. It only serves two purposes; education and developmental staging. For those two, you have a real hardware cluster that serves you superbly showing every nature you can experience with big-ass datacenter cluster.

What do you think about using a cluster of VMs on a normal PC as an alternative? Did you look into that?

I'm looking into that. When you have a lot of memory, it's in fact more convenient in a way that you can carry the entire cluster in your laptop. lol

As someone else who's also built a cluster of Pi 2s, I would agree that the primary purpose is education and fun/tinkering, not performance.

That being said, for light web hosting purposes, a cluster of six Pi 2s performs roughly 70% as well as a similar cluster of 6 VMs on Digital Ocean. See more on this project's wiki, in the performance/benchmarking section: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-dramble

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