3 ms·

Your calculations assume I am talking about bog $20/mo VPS. Nope, I'm talking about a $160 a month system with 2GB ram, 72 MB HD space, etc. As far as I know 4-

Your calculations assume I am talking about bog $20/mo VPS. Nope, I'm talking about a $160 a month system with 2GB ram, 72 MB HD space, etc. As far as I know 4-8 of those fit on one of their systems. If I had a 256/384 slice, yeah, I doubt if the rest of the system could handle enough traffic that the I/O would matter. My 2 year old, nothing special home desktop gives me 72 mb/s. I expect that a pricey VPS will perform at least as well. If not, I could get a dedicated server for $40 more. Running hdparm, slicehost gave me 3-48 mb/s. When it was down under 20, my server was choking doing the simplest tasks - like say, logging into ssh while actually serving HTTP requests. Performance was sucking. Customers complained. I tried tuning my DB. Nope, it wasn't my fault. System load ranged from 3-50 for no apparent reason. The same test on Linode yields 98-165 mb/s. I moved the server to Linode (saving $80 a month!!), have added new features and increased usage, and performance remains excellent. No mysterious slowdowns, no high system load. Everything hums along without a hitch, proving to me it is Slicehost's problem, not mine. Thank god it is theirs to deal with now. This caused me a lot of stress and I'm so glad to be on a host that is giving me what I am paying for. I'm sure you know more about this from that side, but this is my experience as user. 3mb/sec is unusable for a moderately busy server. The fact that other hosts give better performance says all I need to know. If they gave a steady 30-40 mb/s, from your calculations, that's what I'm paying for and yeah, that's probably all I need. The unsteadiness, though, and the dips to near nothing - that is unacceptable. I'm not a hobbyist. This is a business, other businesses depend on us.

lsc 16y ago
Yeah, like I said, I from what I hear, linode is managing disk I/O well. Have you ever gotten a warning about using too much IO from linode? ok, so let's go back and see the math again... so there were 14 systems or so on that 32GiB system, so if everyone was going at the disk, you'd get what, 3.5MB/sec- about what you were seeing. I'm just pointing out, when you 'virtualize' a hard drive, you are sharing a resource that really doesn't share very well. you were getting your 'fair share' of the server at slicehost; it sounds like linode just does a much better job of keeping everyone from trying to use all available disk at all times.
- code_duck 16y ago
  Our i/o isn't really very high. It is under 1 mb/s on average, actually! So I have no idea what the issue is. You're right, 3 MB/S SHOULD be enough because according to our Linode graph, the i/o hasn't been over 2 mb/s in the past week. I can only imagine that certain times at Slicehost must have been providing less than at the times I tested it. That's what is frustrating for me. We don't have a demanding application. It's well written and tuned, but I was having these problems, and as far as I knew I was paying enough to not have such problems. Maybe we're on a spacious server at Linode or were graced with idle neighbors... all I know is, the system load on Linode is muuuch more stable, (and low!) even though our system is doing twice as much. And, it costs half as much.
  - lsc 16y ago
    I didn't say 3MB/sec was enough... just that it was fair. there's a difference, you know. I suspect the differences you saw after moving had to do with how active the other users of the disk were. this may have been chance, or it may have been Linode's policy of pro actively doing things about heavy disk users.
    - code_duck 16y ago
      Thanks for your insights on this.

lsc 16y ago

Yeah, like I said, I from what I hear, linode is managing disk I/O well. Have you ever gotten a warning about using too much IO from linode? ok, so let's go back and see the math again... so there were 14 systems or so on that 32GiB system, so if everyone was going at the disk, you'd get what, 3.5MB/sec- about what you were seeing. I'm just pointing out, when you 'virtualize' a hard drive, you are sharing a resource that really doesn't share very well. you were getting your 'fair share' of the server at slicehost; it sounds like linode just does a much better job of keeping everyone from trying to use all available disk at all times.

code_duck 16y ago
Our i/o isn't really very high. It is under 1 mb/s on average, actually! So I have no idea what the issue is. You're right, 3 MB/S SHOULD be enough because according to our Linode graph, the i/o hasn't been over 2 mb/s in the past week. I can only imagine that certain times at Slicehost must have been providing less than at the times I tested it. That's what is frustrating for me. We don't have a demanding application. It's well written and tuned, but I was having these problems, and as far as I knew I was paying enough to not have such problems. Maybe we're on a spacious server at Linode or were graced with idle neighbors... all I know is, the system load on Linode is muuuch more stable, (and low!) even though our system is doing twice as much. And, it costs half as much.
- lsc 16y ago
  I didn't say 3MB/sec was enough... just that it was fair. there's a difference, you know. I suspect the differences you saw after moving had to do with how active the other users of the disk were. this may have been chance, or it may have been Linode's policy of pro actively doing things about heavy disk users.
  - code_duck 16y ago
    Thanks for your insights on this.