MM very slow to charge

Canguingo

Hi everyone!

I have installed the MagicMirror and I have noticed that when I type pm2 start mm it takes like 2 to 5 minutes to start the MM.

I have version 2.31.0 and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus Rev 1.3

For the rest I am not familiar with programming, so very grateful for your assistance AND patience!

Thanks in advance for any ideas how to solve this.

Cheers!

sdetweil

@Canguingo how did you install MagicMirror?

can you open a terminal window and do
free -m

so we can see memory usage. the latest raspberry pi os, bookworm , will need about 2.5g w MagicMirror running

the hardware is only 1 g as i recall

Canguingo

@sdetweil Hi Sam, thanks!!

This is what i got:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 906 592 65 38 345 314
Swap: 511 278 233

I believe it should be enough. I only use calendar, weather and a small solar PV module. Could it be that Electron takes too much memory?

sdetweil

@Canguingo what os version (seems too small)
do
uname -a
lsb_release -a

Canguingo

@sdetweil

This is what I got:

Linux raspberrypi 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64 GNU/Linux

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)
Release: 12
Codename: bookworm

It could be the SD-card? (I believe it is 5 years old…)

sdetweil

@Canguingo you are actively swapping, 250-ish meg, all that goes on the sd card.

surprised the memory use is as small as it is…

mine is about 1.5gig on swap file…

Canguingo

@sdetweil ok thanks. So is there anything I could do?

sdetweil

@Canguingo on one of my slow systems i used a usb ssd stick

as the pi3 doesn’t support boot from usb, i found a way to boot from sd card, but run from the ssd stick.

ill have to find that again, been years

you could try s newer faster sd card, but they were designed for seldom write, frequent read

Canguingo

Ok thanks. i think i will sruvive with these 2 to 4 minutes, maybe somewhere in the future I’ll change the sd-card.
Do you think I will need to re-install everything again if changing the sd? I guess so…
Since it took me like 2 days to install this, i’ll wait and live with it…

thanks anyway!

sdetweil

@Canguingo if you have a usb adapter for an sd card, linux provides a command to copy disk to disk, dd

if you use the scripted installer it shouldn’t take more than an hour
https://github.com/sdetweil/MagicMirror_scripts

use my backup/restore scripts to save the MagicMirror config and modules list . good for moving to new sd card, machine

https://github.com/sdetweil/MagicMirror-backup-restore