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The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

blog.linode.com

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Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#101

Post by opendais »

orthecreedence wrote: post #100

Bummer, they're taking away 8 cores for the cheap plans and replacing it with 2. Does anyone know if the new processors will offset this difference? I don't know the specs of the processors. Linode's announcements usually come in triples...I'm excited for number three. Let's hope its some kind of cheap storage service.

tl;dr: If you had 40 VMs on 8 cores before, you have 10 on 2 cores now. It is the same ratio of VMs:Cores but with stronger processors.

Long version: "If you take the upgrade, you inherit the new plan specs, vcpus and all.

We’ve greatly reduced the contention on these new machines compared to our old structure, and in testing this new arrangement provides much more consistent CPU time with less potential for steal. We think it’s great and totally worth the move, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. These machines are incredibly fast, faster procs, SSDs, the network is incredible, etc."

From Caker's comment on the blog. It seems that this was done to reduce fighting over core and provided more consistent fair availability of processing power when they tested it b/t VMs.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#102

Post by noir_lord »

kawsper wrote: post #58
Justen wrote: post #37

Higher specs sound really nice, but on HN I see people commenting on the ease of DO's admin tools. How does Linode's compare?

The interface looks a little more clunky, but it works, and it is easy to work with.

It's not clunky it's more "dated" (and very functional).

It also does a fair bit more so apples to oranges a little bit.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#103

Post by conorh »

Benchmarking using wrk the smallest linode (1024 now 2048) serving a page from an untuned Rails application using nginx/passenger getting almost no other traffic. Hard to compare of course given the various other factors, but produced slightly lower performance after the upgrade. Serving a page from nginx directly (no Rails) had no appreciable difference in performance, I guess the Rails web serving is more vCPU bound?

Before Upgrade:

  Running 30s test @ http://...
    5 threads and 20 connections
    Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
      Latency   308.91ms  135.01ms 985.82ms   80.00%
      Req/Sec    14.15      4.61    24.00     66.36%
    2206 requests in 30.00s, 28.51MB read
  Requests/sec:     73.53
  Transfer/sec:      0.95MB
After Upgrade:

  Running 30s test @ http://..
    5 threads and 20 connections
    Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
      Latency   321.74ms  102.45ms 957.74ms   87.32%
      Req/Sec    12.02      2.18    17.00     80.75%
    1858 requests in 30.01s, 24.03MB read
  Requests/sec:     61.92
  Transfer/sec:    819.98KB

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#104

Post by vidyesh »

giulianob wrote: post #9
catinsocks wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DigitalOcean still beats Linode on price as half the time I don't need a 2GB server but I do want to keep servers separate (multiple 512s at $5 is better for me than 1 2GB).

I need 2gb - 4gb servers and DO's quality has decreased since they've grown so much.

Quality decreased? How? Please elaborate.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#105

Post by JohnnyBrown »

geekam wrote: post #35
h4pless wrote: post #16

I notice that Linode talked a good bit about their bandwidth and included outbound bandwidth in their pricing model which DO does not. I wonder if DO has a similar model or if transfer capacity the only thing you have control over.

I do not understand the difference between outbound bandwidth vs the transfer. Can you explain a bit please?

bandwidth is the derivative of transfer over time. It has the same relationship to transfer as speed has to distance.

bandwidth = d(transfer) / dt

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#106

Post by drzaiusapelord »

growt wrote: post #76
kyrra wrote: post #55

I forgot to benchmark the disk before I upgraded but here are some simple disk benchmarks on an upgraded linode (the $20 plan, now with SSD) $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.31593 s, 816 MB/s $ hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 19872 MB in 1.98 seconds = 10020.63 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 2558…

Here is my $5 digitalocean slice (created a few months ago): # dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.7375 s, 287 MB/s # hdparm -tT /dev/disk/by-label/DOROOT /dev/disk/by-label/DOROOT: Timing cached reads: 16394 MB in 2.00 seconds = 8205.62 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 868 MB in 3.00 seconds = 289.17 MB/sec

287 MB/s vs 816 MB/s is huge. Linode is really doing a good job here. I have 4 VMs with them and am very happy. Can't wait to make this move.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#107

Post by surye »

opendais wrote: post #67
mwcampbell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Containers, e.g. through Docker, are good for that kind of thing.

Not if you need them to run on separate physical hosts. [e.g. A galera cluster]

And I would say the market on that need is pretty small, as originally stated, not nonexistent.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#108

Post by drzaiusapelord »

orthecreedence wrote: post #100

Bummer, they're taking away 8 cores for the cheap plans and replacing it with 2. Does anyone know if the new processors will offset this difference? I don't know the specs of the processors. Linode's announcements usually come in triples...I'm excited for number three. Let's hope its some kind of cheap storage service.

Cores presented to your machine by the hypervisor do not have a 1 to 1 relationship with physical cores. In the world of virtual machines, how many cores you have is meaningless.

For example, my VMWare server is a single 8 core processor, but my VM's only see 2 cores, as that's the way I prefer it and I believe VMWare recommends this or even one core. Those 2 virtual cores can access all 8 physical cores.

The only real way to find out your cpu performance is to run a benchmark.

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#109

Post by mindslight »

kyrra wrote: post #98
Thaxll wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those benchmarks are pointless on VM because of the memory caching...

You're probably right. Do you think it's cache at the VM level before writing to disk. Would writing more data out help at all? $ dd bs=1M count=40960 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 40960+0 records in 40960+0 records out 42949672960 bytes (43 GB) copied, 48.455 s, 886 MB/s

The VM should always pass through proper fsync() semantics, so probably not that layer. But they mention battery-backed raid controllers, and it would be appropriate for fsync() to complete after the data has gotten into battery-backed memory, but before it gets to the actual disks.

(Okay Linode, you've finally done it. I'll get rid of my oddball $30/mo plan sometime soon. That extra $10 used to get me a necessary 180MB of extra RAM!)

Re: The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more

#110

Post by Nux »

kyrra wrote: post #55

I forgot to benchmark the disk before I upgraded but here are some simple disk benchmarks on an upgraded linode (the $20 plan, now with SSD) $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.31593 s, 816 MB/s $ hdparm -tT /dev/xvda /dev/xvda: Timing cached reads: 19872 MB in 1.98 seconds = 10020.63 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 2558…

Throughput speed is not everything, in many situations latency is more important. Can you give results for this?

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1500 oflag=dsync

I'm getting "6.40264 s, 120 kB/s" on my laptop's SSD, but on a proper server with a RAID card and cache enabled I get "0.187033 s, 4.1 MB/s".

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