4 ms·

If it had a lot more memory that would be interesting. Though really you can get a 256Mb VPS for £5/month http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ and you d

by rythie 14y ago

If it had a lot more memory that would be interesting. Though really you can get a 256Mb VPS for £5/month http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ and you don't have a setup charge or unreliable hardware.

lucaspiller 14y ago
I was thinking about this as well... maybe not in comparison to cheap providers whose performance are variable, but for £12/month from Linode you can get a 512mb VPS with 20GB of disk space. How does the performance of this ARM box compare to a Linode?
- rythie 14y ago
  Well, for a ballpark figure: md5sum of 3.4 kernel.tar.gz (average of three runs) 512Mb Slicehost 2.2Ghz Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2374 HE = 0.275 seconds 512Mb BeagleBoard XM 1GHz Cortex A8 = 2.023 seconds
  - argus 14y ago
    where was the file stored on the beagle? that could explain a good part of the difference in results you're getting.
    - rythie 14y ago
      time dd if=linux-3.4.tar.bz2 of=/dev/null is 0.7 seconds on the beagleboard and slicehost is more variable but comes to down to 0.5 seconds after a few goes from (1 second). I'd expect it to be read from the page cache anyway. However, I remembered that the beagleboard is using busybox and really the systems are very different from each other, different distribution for example. Update: busybox md5sum is about 20% slower than regular md5sum.
rwmj 14y ago
ARM has strange limits on the amount of memory. The Versatile architecture supports up to 256 MB max. The Versatile Express architecture has a 2GB limit (and no PCI!) Then you have to remember that ARM is presently 32 bit, so you're going to have trouble going over 4 GB at all, which is currently a very small amount for a serious server. 64 bit ARM isn't going to be widely available for at least another 2 years, and at what cost we just don't know (but it's not likely to be £60/server).
- mbell 14y ago
  The Cortex-A15 can address 1TB of ram, its still 32bit so there is the requisite per process limit. Last I heard Cortex-A15 SoC's will be available in volume this year.

by rythie 14y ago

lucaspiller 14y ago

I was thinking about this as well... maybe not in comparison to cheap providers whose performance are variable, but for £12/month from Linode you can get a 512mb VPS with 20GB of disk space. How does the performance of this ARM box compare to a Linode?

rythie 14y ago
Well, for a ballpark figure: md5sum of 3.4 kernel.tar.gz (average of three runs) 512Mb Slicehost 2.2Ghz Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2374 HE = 0.275 seconds 512Mb BeagleBoard XM 1GHz Cortex A8 = 2.023 seconds
- argus 14y ago
  where was the file stored on the beagle? that could explain a good part of the difference in results you're getting.
  - rythie 14y ago
    time dd if=linux-3.4.tar.bz2 of=/dev/null is 0.7 seconds on the beagleboard and slicehost is more variable but comes to down to 0.5 seconds after a few goes from (1 second). I'd expect it to be read from the page cache anyway. However, I remembered that the beagleboard is using busybox and really the systems are very different from each other, different distribution for example. Update: busybox md5sum is about 20% slower than regular md5sum.

rwmj 14y ago

ARM has strange limits on the amount of memory. The Versatile architecture supports up to 256 MB max. The Versatile Express architecture has a 2GB limit (and no PCI!) Then you have to remember that ARM is presently 32 bit, so you're going to have trouble going over 4 GB at all, which is currently a very small amount for a serious server. 64 bit ARM isn't going to be widely available for at least another 2 years, and at what cost we just don't know (but it's not likely to be £60/server).

mbell 14y ago
The Cortex-A15 can address 1TB of ram, its still 32bit so there is the requisite per process limit. Last I heard Cortex-A15 SoC's will be available in volume this year.