4 ms·

Rackspace Cloud used to have the upper hand on smaller sized instances. This is no longer the case with EC2's new 640mb micro instance at about $8/mo reserve. N

by jread 16y ago

Rackspace Cloud used to have the upper hand on smaller sized instances. This is no longer the case with EC2's new 640mb micro instance at about $8/mo reserve. Not top performer, but it gets the job done for lower traffic servers.

zemaj 16y ago
Huh, that's good to know, thanks. That makes my moving choice easier :)
alex1 16y ago
Not to mention you could now have an entire year of EC2 micro (and a bunch of other services) for free.
russell_h 16y ago
For anything that needs much CPU at all that isn't going to be the case. Any Rackspace node will be literally an order of magnitude faster for anything CPU bound, compared to an EC2 micro instance. On the other hand if you just need memory (without necessarily having the clock cycles to quickly access it), or just something that will eventually handle occasional requests, a micro instance should be just fine.
- alex1 16y ago
  Just curious, are there any benchmarking results that show this?
  - danudey 16y ago
    I can't give any benchmarks, but I was doing a compile (openssh) the other day, and I noticed something peculiar. I started the ./configure, and it blasted through 40 or 50 checks almost instantly, then stopped. Suddenly, it started taking about 3-5 seconds for each check (i.e. 'check for blarg in -lfoo'). For the rest of the compile, it was like I'd gone back in time ten years; incredibly slow. Checking top, it showed the %steal at 99.5-100% - the host system was scheduling almost no CPU at all to my machine. Playing around, I found that you basically get a specific allotment of CPU cycles per a certain amount of time, and once you run out you don't get any more for a while (other than the bare minimum to keep the server working). This makes it great for 'bursty' load cases, but after you burst burst, they cut you off, so it's terrible if you suddenly get a sustained burst of traffic. It's so bad that I spun up a clone of the machine, compiled SSH there, and then spun it down afterwards, which turned out to take easily half the time as compiling it on the micro instance itself. So: great for personal blogs; terrible for suddenly getting traffic to your personal blogs.
  - jashkenas 16y ago
    We ran some benchmarks for our workload on Micros here, but compared them to other EC2 offerings, not Rackspace... http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2010/09/evaluating-amazons-ec2-micro-instances/ http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2010/09/evaluating-amazon...
  - jread 16y ago
    This is true, generally all Rackspace Cloud servers perform about the same in terms of CPU and disk IO, so the small Rackspace instances will outperform small EC2 instances. However, they don't scale well and on the high end, they under-perform relative to comparable EC2 instance. Here is some sample data validating this (these web service links will provide XML formatted benchmark results): 1GB Rackspace vs EC2 Micro - CPU Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverId=ec2-us-east.linux.t1.micro|rs-1gb&benchmarkId=ccu&ws-format=xml http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI... 1GB Rackspace vs EC2 Micro - IO Performance (using EC2 EBS): http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverId=ec2-us-east.linux.t1.micro|rs-1gb&benchmarkId=iop&ws-format=xml http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI... 16GB Rackspace vs EC2 cc.4xlarge - CPU Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverId=ec2-us-east.linux.cc.4xlarge|rs-16gb&benchmarkId=ccu&ws-format=xml http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI... 16GB Rackspace vs EC2 cc.4xlarge - IO Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverId=ec2-us-east.linux.cc.4xlarge|rs-16gb&benchmarkId=iop&ws-format=xml http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI...
    - jread 16y ago
      More benchmark results (in a UI) for Rackspace Cloud, EC2 and others are available here: http://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks http://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks (click on the 'View benchmark results' link on the bottom left)
  - jeffbarr 16y ago
    The results reported by danudey should not come as a surprise. The EC2 micro instances are designed for situations where short bursts of CPU are the norm. They were not intended to be used for continuous, compute-intensive chores.
    - danudey 16y ago
      I think the reason I was 'surprised' is that I expected the 'good for sudden bursts of CPU' to be what it was good for, rather than an actual hard limitation on how it works. Perhaps this is because I'm not terribly familiar with how EC2 is managed behind the scenes, being a new convert from Rackspace. My post was mostly meant to illustrate that Amazon puts hard limits on how your VM operates (which makes it inconsistent over time under load), vs. Rackspace, which gives you a constant amount of CPU capacity all the time.
  - russell_h 16y ago
    I can't release the full results of the ones I've run, and they didn't cover Micro instances (this was about a week before they came out). I can say that when executing kcbench (set to do 4 kernel compiles, same configuration on all machines, using a '-j' equal to the number of CPUs in /proc/cpuinfo) I got the following times: EC2 Small Node: ~849 seconds Rackspace 1GB Node: ~81 seconds From what I've seen, a micro instance can supposedly (that is according to Amazon get more "burst" cycles than a small instance, but in the long term will be significantly slower. A sibling to this comment refers to some work that compared small nodes to micro nodes, and found the small node to be over 2 times faster than the micro node for large processing jobs. Based on that, for CPU heavy jobs I would put a 1GB Rackspace node at something like 25x faster than the EC2 micro node. I found that for the most part, in order to compete with Rackspace on CPU you needed to go with at least an Extra Large (which was about on par with Rackspace) or a High-CPU Extra Large (which managed kcbench in ~44 seconds).

by jread 16y ago

zemaj 16y ago

Huh, that's good to know, thanks. That makes my moving choice easier :)

alex1 16y ago

Not to mention you could now have an entire year of EC2 micro (and a bunch of other services) for free.

russell_h 16y ago

For anything that needs much CPU at all that isn't going to be the case. Any Rackspace node will be literally an order of magnitude faster for anything CPU bound, compared to an EC2 micro instance. On the other hand if you just need memory (without necessarily having the clock cycles to quickly access it), or just something that will eventually handle occasional requests, a micro instance should be just fine.

alex1 16y ago
Just curious, are there any benchmarking results that show this?
- danudey 16y ago
  I can't give any benchmarks, but I was doing a compile (openssh) the other day, and I noticed something peculiar. I started the ./configure, and it blasted through 40 or 50 checks almost instantly, then stopped. Suddenly, it started taking about 3-5 seconds for each check (i.e. 'check for blarg in -lfoo'). For the rest of the compile, it was like I'd gone back in time ten years; incredibly slow. Checking top, it showed the %steal at 99.5-100% - the host system was scheduling almost no CPU at all to my machine. Playing around, I found that you basically get a specific allotment of CPU cycles per a certain amount of time, and once you run out you don't get any more for a while (other than the bare minimum to keep the server working). This makes it great for 'bursty' load cases, but after you burst burst, they cut you off, so it's terrible if you suddenly get a sustained burst of traffic. It's so bad that I spun up a clone of the machine, compiled SSH there, and then spun it down afterwards, which turned out to take easily half the time as compiling it on the micro instance itself. So: great for personal blogs; terrible for suddenly getting traffic to your personal blogs.
- jashkenas 16y ago
  We ran some benchmarks for our workload on Micros here, but compared them to other EC2 offerings, not Rackspace... http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2010/09/evaluating-amazons-ec2-micro-instances/ http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2010/09/evaluating-amazon...
- jread 16y ago
  This is true, generally all Rackspace Cloud servers perform about the same in terms of CPU and disk IO, so the small Rackspace instances will outperform small EC2 instances. However, they don't scale well and on the high end, they under-perform relative to comparable EC2 instance. Here is some sample data validating this (these web service links will provide XML formatted benchmark results): 1GB Rackspace vs EC2 Micro - CPU Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverId=ec2-us-east.linux.t1.micro|rs-1gb&benchmarkId=ccu&ws-format=xml http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI... 1GB Rackspace vs EC2 Micro - IO Performance (using EC2 EBS): http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverId=ec2-us-east.linux.t1.micro|rs-1gb&benchmarkId=iop&ws-format=xml http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI... 16GB Rackspace vs EC2 cc.4xlarge - CPU Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverId=ec2-us-east.linux.cc.4xlarge|rs-16gb&benchmarkId=ccu&ws-format=xml http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI... 16GB Rackspace vs EC2 cc.4xlarge - IO Performance: http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverId=ec2-us-east.linux.cc.4xlarge|rs-16gb&benchmarkId=iop&ws-format=xml http://cloudharmony.com/ws/getServerBenchmarkResults?serverI...
  - jread 16y ago
    More benchmark results (in a UI) for Rackspace Cloud, EC2 and others are available here: http://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks http://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks (click on the 'View benchmark results' link on the bottom left)
- jeffbarr 16y ago
  The results reported by danudey should not come as a surprise. The EC2 micro instances are designed for situations where short bursts of CPU are the norm. They were not intended to be used for continuous, compute-intensive chores.
  - danudey 16y ago
    I think the reason I was 'surprised' is that I expected the 'good for sudden bursts of CPU' to be what it was good for, rather than an actual hard limitation on how it works. Perhaps this is because I'm not terribly familiar with how EC2 is managed behind the scenes, being a new convert from Rackspace. My post was mostly meant to illustrate that Amazon puts hard limits on how your VM operates (which makes it inconsistent over time under load), vs. Rackspace, which gives you a constant amount of CPU capacity all the time.
- russell_h 16y ago
  I can't release the full results of the ones I've run, and they didn't cover Micro instances (this was about a week before they came out). I can say that when executing kcbench (set to do 4 kernel compiles, same configuration on all machines, using a '-j' equal to the number of CPUs in /proc/cpuinfo) I got the following times: EC2 Small Node: ~849 seconds Rackspace 1GB Node: ~81 seconds From what I've seen, a micro instance can supposedly (that is according to Amazon get more "burst" cycles than a small instance, but in the long term will be significantly slower. A sibling to this comment refers to some work that compared small nodes to micro nodes, and found the small node to be over 2 times faster than the micro node for large processing jobs. Based on that, for CPU heavy jobs I would put a 1GB Rackspace node at something like 25x faster than the EC2 micro node. I found that for the most part, in order to compete with Rackspace on CPU you needed to go with at least an Extra Large (which was about on par with Rackspace) or a High-CPU Extra Large (which managed kcbench in ~44 seconds).