VPS Decisions

[lostincable]

I have been with my curent VPS provider for a while and when a few people start opening attachments you can tell the difference in speed of the site.

From my investigations it seems to be a combination of the port speed and disk speed. The port is locked at 10mb's which is quite small but in my country OZ it seems to be very standard.

The disks I have been doing various test with Ioping, Linux bench etc all reveal results which indicates the disks are a bit slow.

As an example some tests with dd at various times -

[root@server]#  dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/2gb.dat bs=8k count=256k conv=fdatasync
262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 25.6959 s, 83.6 MB/s
 
[root@server]#  dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/2gb.dat bs=8k count=256k conv=fdatasync
262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 16.355 s, 131 MB/s
 
[root@server]#  dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/2gb.dat bs=8k count=256k conv=fdatasync
262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 20.7795 s, 103 MB/s

I know there is a lot of different factors not just pure dd times but it does show the disk are somewhat slow.

So my dilemma, I can move hosts but there is no guarantee of there disk speeds other than what there sales team can tell me and what is posted on there site.

So I have two options upgrade my current VPS with more CPU / Core / Ram and network port speed but it is on the same node so the disks will stay the same.

These are the two new options.


Existing Host -

6 vCPU's (X5450 CPU)
100Mbit Network Port
4GB Memory

New Host -

2 vCPU's (Intel E5 3.6GHz)
100Mbit Network Port
1GB Memory

So how do other asses there VPS' solutions when hunting around?

I am personally inclined to take the lesser resources i.e lower CPU Cores / Ram but get the newer hardware in the hope the hardware will perform better.

 

[Slavik]

Whats an average example of an attachment?

Eg a 10mb image file?

If they are large files which require large ammounts of data streaming to the end user, and you have a few people doing that all at the same time down a 10mb port, it will cause a bottleneck.

Your disk speeds look fine realy, even the slowest speed you posted is higher than your network port can handle.

 

[hellreturn]

Your disk speeds look fine realy, even the slowest speed you posted is higher than your network port can handle.

This! Even on my RAID 1 machine I get avg 80 Mbps.. so i believe 80Mbps for u VPS is fine unless you are opting for SSD cache or SSD VPS. My SSD cache VPS is super fast.

I would say go for 1Gbps shared port VPS. Your 10Mbps port is your limiting factor. They say 10Mbps.. but you get appx 9Mbps most of the time and that's just 1.25MB/s at max if u consider full 10Mbps.....With 50 users on forum each user max speed is 25KB/s

 

[MattW]

10Mbps isn't acceptable in this day and age. Most home users could now fully max out your upstream connection.

 

[WSWD]

Those drive speeds are not going to be the bottleneck, most likely. I would put my money on the 10mbit port speed, especially since the users are downloading attachments.

100mbit port speed will definitely help. If disk speed is the issue, SSD servers are AMAZING as far as disk i/o is concerned.

Like I said though, the disks are probably not the bottleneck.