Although the progenitor Raspberry Pi was designed as an inexpensive device to get students hooked on coding, the uber-popular SBC family has come a long way in terms of performance and functionality. With modern RPi SBCs equipped with faster cores, plenty of memory, and better I/O provisions, there's no shortage of cool projects you can build with them.

However, it’s easy to end up with an underpowered Raspberry Pi if you’re not careful. So, I’ve put together a list containing the common errors that could cripple your Raspberry Pi’s performance and ways to get rid of them.

5 Your green tinkering board can’t run all your projects

Solution: Try stopping some processes and services

While it may sound rather basic, running too many projects simultaneously on your Raspberry Pi can be rather detrimental to its performance. Sure, the 16GB variant of your Raspberry Pi 5 can tackle dozens of containers without buckling under their weight.

However, complex workloads like emulating retro consoles via RetroArch can take a toll on your tinkering companion, and it might be a good idea to (temporarily) disable the weather station, web server, and Kubernetes cluster while you game. Trust me, it’s easy to forget about the services running in the background when you’ve got too many projects deployed on your SBC.

4 Your Raspberry Pi is too weak to run the OS

Solution: Switch to a lightweight (preferably CLI) distro

Linux distributions, including the Raspberry Pi OS, are nowhere near as resource-intensive as Windows. However, GUI versions of the operating systems can siphon quite a bit of your Raspberry Pi’s processing power, especially if you’re using an older board or a Zero model. In case you plan to work on a particularly demanding project, you’d want to minimize the resources occupied by the OS utilities and services.

So, the next time Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu, Debian, or any other GUI distro gives your Raspberry Pi a hard time, you can switch to their CLI version to minimize the CPU and memory utilization. For hardcore projects where you’d want to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the Raspberry Pi, I recommend checking out the ultra-lightweight DietPi.

3 Your tiny SBC suffers from thermal throttling

Solution: Look into a cooling solution

When I bought my Raspberry Pi 5 hundreds of projects ago, I picked up the Active Cooler on a whim. And let me tell you, it was probably the best investment I made at the time. Depending on your ambient room temperature and workloads, the SBC can go from mildly toasty to thermal-throttled inferno mode.

While the thermal issues are a little exacerbated on the newest Raspberry Pi, they’re still prevalent in its older siblings – especially if your projects involve pushing the miniature board past its limits. So, if you find your Raspberry Pi's performance dropping due to excessive heat, you’d want to attach a cooler to the SBC.

2 Your Raspberry Pi doesn’t get enough juice

Solution: It’s time to get a better power supply

If you’re using a generic charging cable and notice a lightning symbol appearing on the UI every now and then, it’s a surefire sign your current power cables (pun intended) won't cut it. You see, the newer Raspberry Pi models are infamous for their weird wattage requirements – to the point where your average cables can’t deliver enough power to run them at their full potential.

That’s before you factor the random voltage drops from run-of-the-mill cables into the equation. Switching to an official power supply can mitigate these issues on top of ensuring you’ve got enough mileage to overclock your Raspberry Pi for the projects that really need the extra performance boost.

1 You’re using a slow microSD card

Solution: Replace it with a high-speed card (or better yet, an SSD)

The ability to switch operating systems on the fly by swapping microSD cards is undoubtedly a neat feature for enthusiasts looking to try out different distros on their Raspberry Pi.

However, you’d want to go for a high-speed card to avoid bottlenecking your Raspberry Pi’s performance.

In fact, I daresay the SBC family’s reliance on microSD cards is more of a double-edged sword, as they’re a lot slower than SATA SSDs, let alone their NVMe counterparts. For the best performance, you can leverage an external SSD as the boot drive. And if you're a fellow Raspberry Pi 5 owner, you can put the PCIe slot to good use by interfacing a blazing-fast NVMe drive with the SBC.

If all else fails, you can try upgrading your Raspberry Pi

Not all Raspberry Pi models are the same – and the discrepancies in performance can be quite large between two successive generations. In case your Raspberry Pi fails to power your favorite project even after all these tweaks, perhaps it’s time to upgrade to a newer model.

That said, it’s important to remember that the Raspberry Pi SBCs are ARM-based credit card-sized boards that can’t hold a candle to x86 systems. So, if you’re planning to build a powerful NAS server or a Proxmox workstation, you should ditch the idea of using a Raspberry Pi and switch to an x86 mini-PC instead.