RAM Shortages - will 2GB be fine?

Hardware
1

With the recent surge in demand for VRAM, RAM prices and therefore Pi prices have been increasing a lot.

Typically, I’ve just gone with the 4GB or 8GB Pi to give me options but it looks like that luxury is disappearing.

Ran some tests today on the 8GB Pi this evening using the full 1456 x 1088 resolution for the IMX296 Global Shutter camera. Each line is a change/event, focusing on the green for the changes in Python RAM usage:

  1. Turn on exhsv ‘green’ detection - only a very slight increase (around 200MB RAM)
  2. Load the YOLO11-N.py Pytorch model - jumps up to approx. 775MB
  3. With detection on it jumps up to above 800MB

owl_mem
owl_mem1669×1068 92.1 KB

Remember this is at full resolution, on a desktop version of Raspbian running non-optimised models.

So I think we’ll be using 2GB models from now on in. 1GB just seems rather risky (and not feasible unless you’re using Raspbian Lite without the desktop). Even with a Hailo chip, there will still be some RAM overhead when loading the model.