Hosting Discourse on a Raspberry Pi?

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ARM on the server (and in Ruby) will make a lot of progress very soon thanks to Apple’s amazing M1 chip finally appearing in a real laptop.

But the Raspberry Pi itself – even the much improved 4 – is woefully underpowered to be a server. Per this post and the Speedometer 2.0 results…

3B+ Buster 32-bit kernel
9.49/9.66/9.46 = 9.54 Chromium

4B4 Buster 64-bit kernel (32 bit had equal results)
17.2/17.0/17.1 = 17.1 Chromium

OnePlus 7 Pro smartphone (Snapdragon 855, 8GB RAM, Android/Oxygen OS 10)
36.3/35.9/36.8 = 36.3 Chrome

HP Chromebook x2 (dual core M3-7Y30)
68.2/68.6/68.0 = 68.3 Chrome OS 78

Legion Y520 budget gaming laptop (i7-7700HQ Win10x64)
87.4/86.8/87.3 = 87.2 Chrome

Based on those numbers, I hypothesize that a theoretical future Raspberry Pi 5, if it ..

  • at least doubles performance over the Pi 4
  • has a mini M.2 SSD of some kind for storage, not an SD card

.. could maybe be a viable Discourse server for a very low traffic Discourse forum?