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Alfresco on Raspberry Pi

jackarnd
Star Contributor
Star Contributor

Hello,


I just wanted to share the project I am currently working on. This is to add to the project of Kevin Roast about Alfresco Share 5 running on a Raspberry Pi he was at the moment trying to run a Share instance on a Raspberry Pi 1 model B so it was pretty slow but now that the Raspberry Pi 3 is available I thought it would be a great idea to try to run a full Alfresco instance with Share on it.

I didn't install the Alfresco you find in the free trials since it only has an installer for 64bits systems and most of the Raspberry's OS (here I'm using Raspbian) are in 32bits (even though the Raspberry Pi 3 itself has a 64b arch) so too much trouble. I did it through Maven, I created AMP projects.

With Alfresco Maven SDK I generated an Alfresco Platform JAR archetype and an Alfresco Share JAR archetype. Then I tried to run everything up.

I had to deal with many issues due to the Raspberry system. Without going through details, it was mainly because of the RAM memory. So at first, I changed the run.sh file like this to limit maven and java

MAVEN_OPTS="-Xms256m -Xmx512m" JAVA_OPTS="-Xms256m -Xmx512m"  mvn clean install alfresco:run

Then I dealt with the Raspberry memory itself. 1Gb of RAM isn't enough to run two embedded tomcats (just one takes 76,7% of the whole RAM of the Raspberry) so I increased the swap memory to 1Gb and..

It Worked ! I could run  both of the Alfresco repo and the Share tier !

But it was actually pretty slow since the Swap memory of a Raspberry Pi is slow. So I "installed" Zram which compresses the RAM files. Then, Share got a lot more fluent. It is just slow starting up, especially when logging the admin user, but it is pretty fine after that.

So for two normal (not admin) users at the same time (I can't test it on a bigger scale for the moment) it works pretty fine, the Raspberry Pi isn't blowing up and so on so if you want to do something like this enjoy it ! 

In term of perf here is a screenshot of my system after two admin logged, as you can see it is ok even though I'm trying to know if I can improve the management of the memory.

performances of a Raspberry system running an Alfresco instance with Share

As a reminder here are the Raspberry Pi 3 specs :

SoC: Broadcom BCM2837 ;

CPU: 4× ARM Cortex-A53, 1.2GHz ;

RAM: 1GB LPDDR2 (900 MHz) ;

Networking: 10/100 Ethernet, 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless ;

Storage: microSD ;

If you want more details on how to install everything on the Raspberry (because I didn't talk about all the little things I did to make it work) I would be happy to help !

11 REPLIES 11

jackarnd
Star Contributor
Star Contributor

Nice pun ahah Well That's a good idea I'll try to do it if I have the opportunity to have more than one Raspberry Pi in my hands !

antoine_chauve
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making

Hello, good job Jack !

I managed to install Alfresco on RPI 3 on a simplier way, without mvn build : i downloaded the binaries for manual install then applied the alfresco tutorial.

All is working fine ( SOLR, ZRAM etc), it's slow at first load, but faster after. For better performance, i put postgresql on another RPI and increased the JVM size to 640MB.