Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.linode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 289 posts

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

#161

Post by seunosewa »

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…

How did you upgrade? I can't find any upgrade link, even after switching to a 64-bit kernel.

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

#162

Post by gtaylor »

mwcampbell wrote: post #116
madsushi wrote: post #77

Why do I pay Linode $20/month instead of paying DO $5/month(1)? Because Linode treats their servers like kittens (upgrades, addons/options, support), and DO treats their servers like cattle. There's nothing wrong with the cattle model of managing servers. But I'm not using Chef or Puppet, I just have one server that I use to put stuff up on the internet and host a few services. And Linode treats that one solitary ser…

I don't see that distinction at all. Both Linode and DO provide persistent local storage. Both let you resize your server. And now, they're competitive on price; Linode even has hourly billing. Granted, DO has lower-end plans than Linode. But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.

> But I don't see any indication that DO treats servers as disposable or fungible whereas Linode doesn't.

I'm not sure "disposable" is a good word to describe DO's approach. We do know that they cram a lot more people per host machine, though. That may be where the "treat VMs like cattle" statement was getting at.

You need only fire up a few instances of comparable type, get some CPU load, and watch some basic metrics to determine this for yourself.

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

#163

Post by chc »

conorh wrote: post #103

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 boun…

It depends on the task. If your Rails app hits the database a lot, memory availability and disk speed will matter a lot, which favors the new Linode style. If your app just does one small query per page and then gets on with its work, then probably CPU is your most important thing (since most of your time will be spent on app logic, runtime housekeeping and rendering templates).

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

#164

Post by filmgirlcw »

rjknight wrote: post #5

It looks like Linode are still leaving the "incredibly cheap tiny box" market to DO. Linode's cheapest option is $20/month, which makes it slightly less useful for the kind of "so cheap you don't even think about it" boxes that DO provide.

And I would imagine that is very much by design. DO's model is to scale as much as possible -- they want to be all over the place and they have the funding to make those sorts of changes.

As a more established provider, Linode has to decide if adding more customers would be worth the incremental support costs. Given Linode's reputation for support, adding a bunch of LEB customers who aren't likely to renew at the same rates as people who pay more money - and are also likely to have more support requests - competing with that market doesn't make a ton of sense.

Plus, whether fair or not, having a minimum pricing point makes a service seem more premium -- more "ready for serious business." Now, obviously we've all been with expensive hosts that have terrible performance -- but you'd be surprised how many non-technical decision makers will choose a higher-priced offering over a lower-priced offering, on the supposition that "more expensive = better."

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

#165

Post by kevinqi »

6cxs2hd6 wrote: post #83
davexunit wrote: post #36

Cool news, but their website now has the same lame design as DigitalOcean. I liked the old site layout better.

Looks like library.linode.com has the same format, and is still the same fantastic resource. I'm embarrassed to say that once upon a time I used library.linode.com to help walk me through my first Linux server setup... running on Digital Ocean. Yes, I felt like a complete douchebag. I wanted to use Linode but I was one of those $5/month people. However it left me with a sense of obligation to give Linode business som…

Yeah, the library is really excellent - easy to follow and very extensive. It's smart of them to do paid crowdsourcing to create the articles.

It's cool of Linode to make the library available to everyone, not just customers.

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

#166

Post by castis »

seunosewa wrote: post #161
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…

How did you upgrade? I can't find any upgrade link, even after switching to a 64-bit kernel.

If your machines are eligible, there will be an upgrade button in the right nav when looking at one of your linodes.

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

#167

Post by shiloa »

thraxil wrote: post #154
shiloa wrote: post #139

I have mixed feelings about this. We're in the process of moving from Linode to Rackspace but haven't flicked the switch just yet - was planning to this weekend. Our Linode server (16 GB plan) has been performing terrible lately wrt I/O (compared to, say, a Macbook Pro running the same computations), and we decided we've had enough. I guess we'll have to compare the two after the upgrade and decide.

Did you ever put in a support ticket? I've had I/O performance issues with Linode boxes before and it's always been quickly fixed when they are notified.

I did, they switched us to a new machine - no change. Their support was great, but the hardware needed to catch up. Perhaps this upgrade will help.

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

#169

Post by stefantalpalaru »

eli wrote: post #22
endijs wrote: post #18

Most interesting part in this great upgrade is that they went from 8CPU setup to 2CPU setup. But yeah - 2x more RAM, SSDs will guarantee that I'm not going to switch anytime soon. Sadly I need to wait a week until this will be available in London.

"vCPU" In a virtualized environment, the number of "CPUs" you can see is probably not a great way to measure how much computing power you have.

On a host that's mostly idle and where there are no CPU usage caps, seeing 2 cores instead of 8 is a pretty serious drawback if you use Gentoo on Linode like I do.
Post reply on HN