Before taking the drastic step of moving to a Pi 4, I thought I would see what could be achieved by looking at using some of the standard Raspberry Pi performance enhancement techniques.

First, I installed More RAM using Pi-Apps.  This uses a compression algorithm on the contents of RAM to reduce its size and thus increase the size of virtual memory at the expense of CPU time. It replaces swap space on the SD card which I had already increased to get Chromium to display pages without freezing. I did not see a noticeable improvement in displaying web pages, however, moving swap space from the SD card onto compressed RAM or zram has the big advantage of reducing wear on the SD card.

Secondly, I added the following overclocking instructions to /boot/config.txt :

#overclock 1300
arm_freq=1300
over_voltage=6
core_freq=500

The combination of these two modifications makes Chromium just about useable although still painfully slow at times. In fact, I used Pickle Pi running Chromium to write this log,

I am still working out how to fit a Pi 4 into Pickle Pi - the subject of the next log I hope.