"Hey Neon, Talk to ChatGPT" - Mark II Voice Assistant - Update May 2023

I found this nice SSD benchmark tool: Solid State Drives (SSD) - Page #1 - pibenchmarks.com

Ran in on my MK2:

> Enter a description of your storage and setup (Example: Kingston A400 SSD on Pi 4 using StarTech SATA to USB adapter)
> Description: mycroft MK2 with 1TB USB-SSD CT1000MX 
> (Optional) Enter alias to use on benchmark results.  Leave blank for completely anonymous.
> Alias (leave blank for Anonymous): 
> 
>      Category                  Test                      Result     
> HDParm                    Disk Read                 293.39 MB/s              
> HDParm                    Cached Disk Read          303.63 MB/s              
> DD                        Disk Write                175 MB/s                 
> FIO                       4k random read            23432 IOPS (93729 KB/s)  
> FIO                       4k random write           8576 IOPS (34304 KB/s)   
> IOZone                    4k read                   26039 KB/s               
> IOZone                    4k write                  23425 KB/s               
> IOZone                    4k random read            18393 KB/s               
> IOZone                    4k random write           26958 KB/s               
> 
>                           Score: 7513                                        
> 
> Compare with previous benchmark results at: https://pibenchmarks.com/

After updating my wake-word “Hey, Mycroft” isn’t working at all any more. Pressing the button on my Mark II and asking a question also doesn’t work. I guess it can’t hear me.

A lot of MK2 owners experience that he RPI4 runs out of memory.
The kernel then kills a process and the chain of programs is broken to let neon function.
Only thing you can do is perform a restart or power cycle.
To check before you reboot if this is the case:
Login with ssh (ssh neon@neon.local) to your mk2 and issue this command:
sudo dmesg | grep -i oom
if nothing is returned and you see the “$” prompt directly , your mk2 did not run out of memory.
If you see any other kind of output, you probably did

Hmm, no I guess it’s not a memory issue because there is no output.

Glad you are certain the fact there is no output is not caused by a possible oom situation.

Well I’m not certain, but I agree that the lack of an out-of-memory message in the kernel message buffer suggests that’s not an issue. I’ve already rebooted a few times, so unless anyone has any other ideas I guess I’ll just reflash the drive.

I have another thread where I’m asking about the viability of using the Mark II for some low-resource server apps (syncthing and vdirsyncer, mainly), but if reflashing is the answer here then I’ll hold back because reinstalling things would be a pain.

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The USB stick is really to slow to do almost anything.
Neon got so much more snappy when I moved to a USB-SSD.
I you could exchange the RPI4 -2GB for a 4 or even 8GB ram version, you probably could side load a lot more.
I just rebooted to new alpha so only 1 hr uptime:

Bootup: Thu Jun 15 08:55:44 2023   Load average: 2.22 2.96 4.27 13/624 2535    
user  :   01:22:33.27  30.7%  page in :          1273947                       
nice  :   00:00:00.00   0.0%  page out:           243500                       
system:   00:15:24.82   5.7%  page act:           186774                       
IOwait:   00:00:05.98   0.0%  page dea:           204893                       
hw irq:   00:00:00.00   0.0%  page flt:          1976045                       
sw irq:   00:00:18.73   0.1%  swap in :            10059                       
idle  :   02:50:22.00  63.4%  swap out:            53832                       
uptime:   01:08:17.38         context :         48912996

CPU was 63% idle, but the load seems to always be around 2, so I assume there is an IO delay.

And it is already using swap memory in the standard 2GB RPI4:

$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           1.8Gi       1.6Gi        57Mi       103Mi       255Mi       174Mi
Swap:          2.0Gi       193Mi       1.8Gi
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