Armbian Tuning - aaronwmorris/indi-allsky GitHub Wiki

Armbian Performance & Memory Tuning

Armbian utilizes RAM-based filesystem optimizations (such as armbian-ramlog, armbian-zram-config, and a tmpfs mount on /tmp) by default to protect SD card endurance. On single-board computers with 1 GB or 2 GB of RAM, these mechanisms can exhaust physical memory during high-resolution RAW image processing, timelapse video encoding, or manual package compilation.

1. Disable or Expand tmpfs on /tmp

Compiling large modules or buffering extensive image stacks in /tmp will exhaust RAM if /tmp is mounted as an in-memory tmpfs:

  1. Inspect /etc/fstab: 
    sudo nano /etc/fstab
  2. Locate any active tmpfs mount assigned to /tmp: 
    # Comment out the /tmp mount line:
# tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,nosuid 0 0
  3. Alternatively, expand the tmpfs size limit or mount a physical disk path.

2. Adjust or Disable armbian-ramlog

armbian-ramlog stores system logs in RAM and syncs to disk periodically. If systemd journal logs grow rapidly due to camera driver debugging:

  1. Edit the configuration: 
    sudo nano /etc/default/armbian-ramlog
  2. Disable the service or increase the allocated buffer: 
    ENABLED=false

3. Physical Swap Configuration

ZRAM compresses memory in-place; under extreme memory pressure, compression CPU overhead competes with camera capture. For low-RAM SBCs, configure a dedicated physical swap file on eMMC, NVMe, or fast USB storage:

  1. Disable Armbian default ZRAM swap: 
    sudo nano /etc/default/armbian-zram-config
# Set ENABLED=false
  2. Install and configure dphys-swapfile: 
    sudo apt-get install dphys-swapfile
sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile
# Configure CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048 (for 2GB swap)
sudo systemctl restart dphys-swapfile

4. Kernel Virtual Memory Tuning

Reduce the kernel's aggressive tendency to swap active process memory:

echo "vm.swappiness = 1" | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/90-indi-allsky.conf
sudo sysctl --system

[!NOTE] On Armbian systems, check /etc/sysctl.conf to ensure existing vm.swappiness overrides do not take precedence.