4 ms·

Though the tests were conducted with Postgre, I suspect these results will be interesting to anyone running a database. This is the sort of thing that causes m

Though the tests were conducted with Postgre, I suspect these results will be interesting to anyone running a database. This is the sort of thing that causes me to inquire about the possibility of accessing external hardware from my VPS on Linode. VPS hosts should really consider offering SSD options for a premium, IMHO.

JshWright 16y ago
Perhaps you're not familiar with how tight the margins are in the VPS business. SSDs may be small when you're sticking one in your desktop but when you're running 40 VPSs on a 1U box, they're huge. Density is king in VPS land, and adding an extra drive for each customer (or simply having to have the ability to add an extra drive for each customer) would kill that density. I'd you special hardware, get a dedicated box.
- carbocation 16y ago
  You're quite right about my unfamiliarity. Still, it seems that you could have only a few boxes with this option and, as i said, charge quite a premium. I suppose if I really believed this, I would execute on it...
  - JshWright 16y ago
    "A few boxes" of anything isn't worth it. Standardization is critical to having any sort of profitability. As soon as you start spinning up a small number of custom boxes, you're adding a lot of work. Enough work that the "premium" you mention would be pretty large (large enough that it would probably wipe out any price advantage in the first place). If you really need super fast i/o, then why are you using a VPS in the first place? Virtualization adds a non-trivial amount of overhead to i/o, and there's really no way around that (technologies like VT-d and virtio are helping, but virtualization is still virtualization)
    - carbocation 16y ago
      What you say makes perfect sense. For me the decision to use VPS was motivated by cost and simplicity. But when it comes to my database server, IO will bottleneck me long before CPU or bandwidth or other such concerns. That will probably lead me to some sort of single-master, multi-slave setup — but I suppose I just feel like that could be substantially delayed if I were to have my DB on an SSD.

JshWright 16y ago

Perhaps you're not familiar with how tight the margins are in the VPS business. SSDs may be small when you're sticking one in your desktop but when you're running 40 VPSs on a 1U box, they're huge. Density is king in VPS land, and adding an extra drive for each customer (or simply having to have the ability to add an extra drive for each customer) would kill that density. I'd you special hardware, get a dedicated box.

carbocation 16y ago
You're quite right about my unfamiliarity. Still, it seems that you could have only a few boxes with this option and, as i said, charge quite a premium. I suppose if I really believed this, I would execute on it...
- JshWright 16y ago
  "A few boxes" of anything isn't worth it. Standardization is critical to having any sort of profitability. As soon as you start spinning up a small number of custom boxes, you're adding a lot of work. Enough work that the "premium" you mention would be pretty large (large enough that it would probably wipe out any price advantage in the first place). If you really need super fast i/o, then why are you using a VPS in the first place? Virtualization adds a non-trivial amount of overhead to i/o, and there's really no way around that (technologies like VT-d and virtio are helping, but virtualization is still virtualization)
  - carbocation 16y ago
    What you say makes perfect sense. For me the decision to use VPS was motivated by cost and simplicity. But when it comes to my database server, IO will bottleneck me long before CPU or bandwidth or other such concerns. That will probably lead me to some sort of single-master, multi-slave setup — but I suppose I just feel like that could be substantially delayed if I were to have my DB on an SSD.