Once upon a time, Rob Seastrom <rs@seastrom.com> said:
The Pi is low-powered in more ways than one. Last fall I ran some (admittedly fairly simple minded) DNS benchmarks against a Raspberry Pi Model B and an ODROID U3.
The Pi is not really the right tool for any "production" job IMHO. Even if you are restricting yourself to cheap single-board ARM systems, there are better choices like BeagleBone, Cubieboard, etc. If you need a little more power (and want x86 to make things easier), go for a Minnowboard or the like. All of these are "hobbiest" solutions though. If you want cheap and compact DNS for a not-too-high request rate, just get a cheap wifi router that'll run a flavor of Open Source firmware (I prefer OpenWRT). Disable the wifi and run dnsmasq or bind (peruse the OpenWRT supported device page to check RAM capacity). Beyond that, or if you want a rack-mount solution, get an Atom CPU based barebones, like a SuperMicro, use an SSD, and it'll be relatively quiet (and at least the SuperMicros have IPMI built in for remote management). -- Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net>