When I set up my raspberry pi cluster, I used a USB Charger to power all 4 raspberry pis instead of the official power supply. The worry I had with this setup is that I would not get enough power. If that happens the raspberry pi will throttle the performance. If you were using the GUI, you would see a lightning bolt appear. Since I didn’t install the GUI, I needed a way to check if I was getting throttled.
This the command I used to check if I’ve been throttled lately. I’ll occasionally check this during periods of high performance (analyzing a game)
sudo watch -n 1 vcgencmd get_throttled
I use watch which updates every second to see if it changes. The output should be a message like:
throttled=0x0
I’m not exactly sure what it would say if you were being throttled, but likely something like 0x1.