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I tried ARM servers in Scaleway and honestly, unless your profile is sort of a sysadmin or you're motivated, it's just dealing with some issues and less power o

I tried ARM servers in Scaleway and honestly, unless your profile is sort of a sysadmin or you're motivated, it's just dealing with some issues and less power overall. Also, AFAIR they were around the same price of X86 instances. But then again, I have almost no sysadmin skills, so maybe it was my lack of knowledge.

bisby 7y ago
My experience with ARM (locally anyway, raspberry pi's and pinebooks) is that everything works great, if it works. ARM binaries available? Great. You're all set. (hopefully its for the right generation of ARM though, I can't get SteamLink software to run on my pinebook because it does raspberry pi hardware version checks that obviously fail). Not available? You're gonna run into one of two scenarios: Closed source app? Sorry. Just never going to get it (unless you want to run it through qemu at a huge performance hit and YMMV). Open source app? Compile it yourself! Which takes noticeably longer than x86 for me. Maybe in server this works out. For desktop, compiling st myself was actually the path of least resistance to getting a terminal I liked. I wouldn't have wanted to compile firefox on ARM though without some serious server horsepower. When I used to build docker images they would sometimes take hours, for things that were less than a minute on x86.
- PeterCorless 7y ago
  In the cloud, we believe forward-thinking application developers will have little problem porting their software to support their users on the new chipset. That is definitely more of an issue for on-prem or private use, though.
- Const-me 7y ago
  Compiling my C++ code on ARM on a daily basis, and here it’s OK. In my case the bottleneck was storage. I’ve solved by building on a mounted network share located on a fast SSD on a windows PC. Gigabit LAN + desktop-grade SSD are much faster than eMMC of my target device.
- qxnqd 7y ago
  >Open source app? Compile it yourself! Which takes noticeably longer than x86 for me. Heh, it's funny, right? I switched from an x86 server to an arm server and now it takes seconds and seconds to log me in using ssh. It's like the server really struggles when crunching numbers.
  - bisby 7y ago
    If fairness, I tried a raspberry pi cluster. and it was much slower than my xeon server. and i was insanely slower. but i could run the entire pi cluster off a 6 port phone charger, instead of an 800w power supply. Power bill was one of my driving motivators. but ultimately i went back to x86 for performance
- exikyut 7y ago
  > When I used to build docker images they would sometimes take hours, for things that were less than a minute on x86. That is almost certainly because it was pulling a majority of prebuilt binaries, IIUC.
karambahh 7y ago
Disclosure: I currently work at Scaleway but wasn't there at the time when we rolled out the 1st ever ARM baremetal offering. It was massively cheaper than their x86 counterparts at Scaleway or competitors, thanks in no small parts to very clever electrical engineering by my colleagues. I think we never publicly disclosed power consumption levels but.... let's say our ARM boards are very power efficient :)
sanxiyn 7y ago
Scaleway ARM is very underpowered (but also cheap) compared to AWS ARM. Even A1 was nearly 3x faster than Scaleway. M6g is nearly 20x faster.
usr1106 7y ago
Scaleway has 2 kinds of ARM ARMv7 as a physical server. No virtualization. Very low performance, very cheap. Good for running your personal web server or similar, but not for anything seeing load. Looks they have not maintained the kernel for more than a year. They let it die, would be my guess. ARMv8. A virtualized platform. I have not evaluated it myself yet.

bisby 7y ago

My experience with ARM (locally anyway, raspberry pi's and pinebooks) is that everything works great, if it works. ARM binaries available? Great. You're all set. (hopefully its for the right generation of ARM though, I can't get SteamLink software to run on my pinebook because it does raspberry pi hardware version checks that obviously fail). Not available? You're gonna run into one of two scenarios: Closed source app? Sorry. Just never going to get it (unless you want to run it through qemu at a huge performance hit and YMMV). Open source app? Compile it yourself! Which takes noticeably longer than x86 for me. Maybe in server this works out. For desktop, compiling st myself was actually the path of least resistance to getting a terminal I liked. I wouldn't have wanted to compile firefox on ARM though without some serious server horsepower. When I used to build docker images they would sometimes take hours, for things that were less than a minute on x86.

PeterCorless 7y ago
In the cloud, we believe forward-thinking application developers will have little problem porting their software to support their users on the new chipset. That is definitely more of an issue for on-prem or private use, though.
Const-me 7y ago
Compiling my C++ code on ARM on a daily basis, and here it’s OK. In my case the bottleneck was storage. I’ve solved by building on a mounted network share located on a fast SSD on a windows PC. Gigabit LAN + desktop-grade SSD are much faster than eMMC of my target device.
qxnqd 7y ago
>Open source app? Compile it yourself! Which takes noticeably longer than x86 for me. Heh, it's funny, right? I switched from an x86 server to an arm server and now it takes seconds and seconds to log me in using ssh. It's like the server really struggles when crunching numbers.
- bisby 7y ago
  If fairness, I tried a raspberry pi cluster. and it was much slower than my xeon server. and i was insanely slower. but i could run the entire pi cluster off a 6 port phone charger, instead of an 800w power supply. Power bill was one of my driving motivators. but ultimately i went back to x86 for performance
exikyut 7y ago
> When I used to build docker images they would sometimes take hours, for things that were less than a minute on x86. That is almost certainly because it was pulling a majority of prebuilt binaries, IIUC.

karambahh 7y ago

Disclosure: I currently work at Scaleway but wasn't there at the time when we rolled out the 1st ever ARM baremetal offering. It was massively cheaper than their x86 counterparts at Scaleway or competitors, thanks in no small parts to very clever electrical engineering by my colleagues. I think we never publicly disclosed power consumption levels but.... let's say our ARM boards are very power efficient :)

sanxiyn 7y ago

Scaleway ARM is very underpowered (but also cheap) compared to AWS ARM. Even A1 was nearly 3x faster than Scaleway. M6g is nearly 20x faster.

usr1106 7y ago

Scaleway has 2 kinds of ARM ARMv7 as a physical server. No virtualization. Very low performance, very cheap. Good for running your personal web server or similar, but not for anything seeing load. Looks they have not maintained the kernel for more than a year. They let it die, would be my guess. ARMv8. A virtualized platform. I have not evaluated it myself yet.