Steam cache on Raspberry pi 4B

Gaming
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Hi all, hope you’re doing well.

Since I have quite a few LAN parties lately I wanted to build a Steam cache server. (Origin Uplay)

Since the Raspberry PI 4B has a nice gigabit network interface I tough this will make a great little server. I also have a Synology NAS for storage or I could hook someting up to the Raspberry with USB.

The only problem is that I could not seem to make it work.

I’m using lancache docker container:
https://hub.docker.com/r/lancachenet/monolithic

using the quick start listed on there site:

The problem is that the container won’t start even on local storage. (sd card)

I want the run it of the USB SSD attached to the raspberry, but I cant make the container run on it.

I have tried raspbian and ubuntu.

Do you guys have any ideas?
I’m fairly new to docker.

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Is your docker setup functional?

If you try running something simpler, what happens:

for example: docker run -it --rm alpine

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They don’t build ARM images for the container, that’s going to be the first hurdle

If you look at the list of ‘tags’ (docker images), you’ll see they only build it for linux/amd64, not ARMv7 or aarch64 (depending on which kernel/userspace you’re using). It may be possible to build the image on ARM, but the dependencies inside will also need converted (not just a simple ‘docker build’, most likely).

After that, the next hurdle would be disk I/O. Steam stores the files in tiny chunks, and for it to perform well you’ll really want to put this on SSDs.

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Found this on github:

Will test it this weekend.

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Any luck?

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yes it does work. I have it running on my Tinkerboard for a while already. Just follow updated steps on jrcichra’s github

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How did you setup your storage? I get it to compile but it’s acting really weird. sometimes I get 50 MB sometimes 1,5. I’m running of an external SSD.

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Seems like its working now. But I don’t see any speeds improvements. This was mainly a setup for LAN parties. I have 250 Mb internet access so this is pretty good. But steam never seams to get to 1 gigabit…

Any ideas?

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after some research I found the problem…
Raspberry pi 4 USB 3.0 speeds are limited at a theoretical maximum off 60 MB.
Realistically that would be something like 50 MB, which I’m getting…

Therefore everything is working as it should but for those wondering to get anything faster you should get a other form of storage.

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That’s on 3b+, 4b can do 5gbps