Cheers. I'll give drizzle a bash. I had a stack of ~350 and PI crashed hard. I had a little tanty... caved and got the cpu. At least now when it f's up it's quickly
I'm a compter systems engineer by trade and have always resisted big fancy CPU's as they tend to mask or hide general performance (and other) issues when developing systems. Developing on peasant grade PC's means the issues get fixed immediately in the process and don't get to compound.