I recently added a Raspberry Pi3B+ to my ever-increasing Raspberry Pi devices . I have a few of the Model 3’s running as RasPlex clients throughout the house. This new Pi was destined for a different purpose – trying to get the kids into coding!
I downloaded and deployed the March 2018 Raspbian OS, deployed it to an 8GB micro-SD card and fired the device up. I very, very quickly ran into performance issues when using Chromium, to the point of it crashing the Pi, and needing to pull the power to hard reset.
I’ve since dramatically improved this situation by extending the swap size, as below. Note that this solution will likely cause increased wear/ performance degradation over time on the SD card – at £6.00 for a 16GB card I am not too concerned.
# Modify the swap config sudo vi /etc/dphys-swapfile # Change the CONF_SWAPSIZE value to 1024, or greater if you have a larger SD card/ sufficnet space. CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024 # Now save your changes and reboot the Pi sudo reboot
Whilst not perfect, this has made the Pi 3B+ acceptable when using Chromium and multiple tabs.