12 ms·
Linode NextGen: The Hardware
- pavs 14y agoAnyone knows whats the clock speed for each virtual cores? Isn't that a relevant and important information? For instance if the previous virtual cores were all 1ghz and new cores are all 500mhz, doubling the cores won't do much good if you don't know their clock speed. I was critical of last Linode's NextGen post discussion, because I didn't think upgrade was impressive compare to others, but this is one is a nice bump, memory is probably what most people will care about more though. So maybe next refresh is the memory?
- drKarl 14y agoJust rebooted and made cat /proc/cpuinfo and the and its 2.27Ghz, so the last of the 8 CPUs is processor : 7 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 26 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz stepping : 5 microcode : 0x11 cpu MHz : 2266.746 cache size : 8192 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8 core id : 0 cpu cores : 1 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 11 wp : yes flags : fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 cmov pat clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht nx constant_tsc nonstop_tsc pni ssse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt hypervisor bogomips : 4533.49 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management:
- Vieira 14y agoThat is the old 4 core cpu they have been using. We will probably have to wait some weeks before this all takes effect.
- jedicoffee 14y agoPretty sure just reading the post answers this, "Linodes will start landing on NextGen hardware in the next week or so".
- carbocation 14y agoThe post is a bit confusing, though, because well before you get to the line that you quoted, the article states: "And we’re upgrading all Linodes to 8 cores! Right now. As in all you need to do is reboot to double the computing power of your Linode. By the time the host refresh is completed the average Linode will be running on hardware that is less than 1 year old." I, for one, thought that it was ready now after reading that. In fact, from the comments, it's clear that for some customers, this is in fact ready: "BizzarTech: Rebooted my 1024 and moar cores!!! Thank you!!"
- asb 14y agoNo, the move to new hardware and increase in the number of available cores is separate. If you reboot right now you'll get access to more of the 'cores' on the host system (though I suspect they're really just "threads" in Intel terminology). But you're still running on the older L5520 hardware.
- carbocation 14y agoI rebooted and confirmed; indeed the older L5520 is still the processor being used on my particular linode: <snip> processor : 7 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 26 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz stepping : 5 microcode : 0x11 cpu MHz : 2266.746 cache size : 8192 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8 </snip>
- karlshea 14y agoThis is from a plan that is less than a week old: processor : 7 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 44 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5630 @ 2.13GHz stepping : 2 microcode : 0x15 cpu MHz : 2133.460 cache size : 12288 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8
- timewasted 14y agoI just rebooted one of my Linodes, and I got this: processor : 7 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 45 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L 0 @ 1.80GHz stepping : 7 microcode : 0x70a cpu MHz : 1800.059 cache size : 20480 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8 core id : 0 cpu cores : 1 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 13 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 cmov pat clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht nx constant_tsc nonstop_tsc pni pclmulqdq ssse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes hypervisor ida arat epb pln pts dtherm bogomips : 3600.11 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 46 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: Edit: I should perhaps mention that this is a 512MB Linode, on the off chance that it makes a difference.
- doppel 14y agoI rebooted mine as well and got @ 2.27 GHz, so I guess that they probably haven't gotten to your server yet.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jonknee 14y ago> Powering our NextGen hosts are two Intel Sandy Bridge E5-2670 processors. The E5-2670 is at the high end of the power-price-performance ratio. Each E5-2670 enjoys 20 MB of cache and has 8 cores running at 2.6 Ghz. http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-do-i-get-my-fair-share-of-cpu http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-do-i-get-my-fair-share-of-... > We limit the number of Linodes placed on each host machine. We also only place one plan type on each host. In the worst-case scenario, you're splitting CPU time evenly with your fellow Linoders, but are still able to use the full potential of the host if others are idle.
- bluedino 14y ago> So maybe next refresh is the memory? Probably - according to their FAQ it looks like each host has about ~20GB of memory which is pretty small these days.
- recuter 14y ago> So what about SSDs? There’s no question SSDs are in Linode’s future, however enterprise-class SSDs (SLC or eMLC based) are prohibitively expensive. And although MLC-based drives are cheaper we just don’t feel right about using consumer grade laptop drives to power your Linodes. So we will wait until capacities for enterprise SSDs increase. Well that is disappointing and arguably more important for many people. Not to be a debbie downer or anything.
- jonknee 14y agoYou did forget to quote this part though: > We’ve also moved to the latest generation of the enterprise-grade hard disk drives — doubling their cache, increasing their port speed, and decreasing latency and access time It would be nice to have SSD as an (expensive) option for those that can absorb the cost.
- gingerlime 14y agoyes, very happy with more cores, and as usual extremely happy being a linode customer. Would be even happier with more / cheaper memory. also perhaps a more elastic storage option to stretch/shrink your linode disks, take snapshots (not assigned to a given linode) would be great.
- isalmon 14y agoOne of the reason why I had to switch to Digital Ocean is exactly this. I need my DB to be extremely fast, I ran some tests and, unsurprisingly, their SSD's were sometimes 10-20x faster. If Linode had an expensive SSD plan, I would totally use it for my DB and keep the same HDD linodes for the rest.
- phillmv 14y agoHow big is your database? Why are you not keeping it in memory? Was this an actual, real bottleneck? How many servers do you currently rent?
- jedicoffee 14y ago
- thesmok 14y agoWow, first time in my life i was able to found a link to the company.com at the header of blog.company.com! Good Linode.
- silasb 14y agoThis also annoys me.
- StavrosK 14y agoI like my approach: http://www.instahero.com/blog/ http://www.instahero.com/blog/ There's a link to the site at the top, and a link to the blog below that.
- simplon 14y agoyes! i like this approach.. rather than hitting the blog main page when i click on the header
- bluedino 14y agoI wonder if they considered allowing 4 cores, but double the CPU allotment? 4x1000MHz CPU instead of 8x500MHz CPU, for example. 8 cores does give you the highest best-case performance, since you can use 100% of each core if the other Linodes on your host are not using them. They show the 1024 Linode with 8 CPU's as an example. But they also state that there are on average 20 1024 Linodes on each host machine, making 20x8 = 160 vCPU's being used. Marketing-wise, more cores sounds impressive. But I wonder if performance per physical host is reduced splitting them into so many vCPU's
- madsushi 14y agoJust like a good showman would, Linode will be saving their RAM announcement for last. Network, CPU, disk again (maybe?), anything else (new services/options/load balancing/etc), and finally, memory.
- machbio 14y agoEveryone is waiting for RAM and Linode knows its customer better - hope they make it soon.. people will come in hordes to Linode then from amazon..disk performance is not so good with Amazon - linode should have known betterm with SSD they could have had a bigger impact then they currently are.. As for SSDs,it should be their in another 6 months..as linode believes in quality over just providing the damn thing.. see what they did in Network Routers and Cores..
- _rs 14y agoI've been thinking about this more and more. I don't think RAM is going to be step 3/3 in this series. The first step was "the network" and this step is clearly "the hardware" (which I assume would include RAM given that it includes HDD and CPU). On top of this they mentioned before this process started that they had something new coming that doesn't require you having a Linode on your account. Edit: though I certainly agree it has been long enough since the last RAM upgrade, and I would love to see one soon.
- machbio 14y agoThird Step would be "software" ..may be an upgrade to features on dashboard on linode..
- asb 14y agoYes, definitely looks like it: https://twitter.com/asbradbury/status/312984696852185088 https://twitter.com/asbradbury/status/312984696852185088
- eco 14y agoInteresting that that mentions 4-core Xen instances.
- antihero 14y agoHmm. Just rebooted and I'm on 8 cores but an L5520. Does this mean the CPU upgrade is skipping my Linode?
- radimm 14y ago> Linodes will start landing on NextGen hardware in the next week or so. Linodes on servers that are being retired will be required to migrate onto newer hardware. For those affected, you’ll receive support tickets with the details and with plenty of lead time (weeks). You’ll also have the opportunity to perform the move early and at your leisure if you prefer.
- trotsky 14y agoI'm not super up on os level virtualization providers, but I'm curious why exposing 8 cores is an advantage. Based on the ram sizing it seems like they expect to run 100+ containers per processor - so surely they're restricting cpu time per process (instance) somehow. If you use a bunch of cpu time won't you just get starved out when you hit an invisible cpu wall? If you're only getting 1/10th or less of a cpu core wouldn't it make more sense to pin each instance to just a couple of cores minimizing context switches?
- asb 14y agoYou can use as much spare CPU as is available. Upon contention, the CPU is (in theory) dished out fairly. Other schemes are of course possible (like Amazon's EC2 where you get a fixed CPU allotment).
- bradleyjg 14y agoEC2 doesn't actually reserve physical CPU time per vm, do they? I had assumed that the lack of burst just means they are keeping the statistical multiplexing windfall for themselves.
- shrike 14y agoExcluding t1.micro instances you are getting a fixed, dedicated amount of CPU per instance, CPU is not a shared resource on EC2.
- bradleyjg 14y agoSo just to be clear: If I have a reserved instance I'm not using there is a CPU sitting somewhere doing running HLT cycles? Wow.
- toomuchtodo 14y agoVs needing CPU cycles and you having to wait if someone else is using that shared CPU time? There are always tradeoffs.
- grey-area 14y agoAccording to the linode FAQ [1], current linode servers have roughly 20GB of RAM shared out. Does anyone know the spec of the new servers and what the max memory would be? The max for the CPU seems to be 750GB [2]. Presumably servers would be far less than the theoretical max, but fingers crossed they'll be able to bump the memory at some point soon so that they're a bit more competitive with others. I was really hoping that was going to be this announcement, however the fact they've titled it 'The Hardware' hints that there might be nothing new on RAM in the next announcement, which would be a shame. Upgrades to CPU are nice, but it'd be nicer to see a RAM upgrade, as almost everyone is constrained on RAM rather than CPU or disk, particularly on newer hardware and with their new bandwidth limits. I feel rather ungrateful now having said all that. Thanks anyway Linode! [1] http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-many-linodes-share-a-host http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-many-linodes-share-a-host [2] http://ark.intel.com/products/64595/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2670-20M-Cache-2_60-GHz-8_00-GTs-Intel-QPI http://ark.intel.com/products/64595/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...
- beachstartup 14y agoram is the only thing you can't share, and hence, the only thing that makes shared hosting providers any money.
- Nux 14y agoIt's not impossible: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KSM https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KSM
- shuzchen 14y agoFWIW there was a big RAM increase some years ago: http://blog.linode.com/2010/06/16/linode-turns-7-big-ram-increase/ http://blog.linode.com/2010/06/16/linode-turns-7-big-ram-inc... Taking Linode's past behavior (history of reinvesting profits into upgrading hardware/infrastructure and passing that value over to the customer rather than just milking higher margins), I'd expect them to someday upgrade RAM when it becomes economically feasible.
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
- larrys 14y ago"We’re investing millions to make your Linodes faster. Crazy faster. " Skeptical. I'm wondering if this is just advertising hyperbole because Linode doesn't seem to be large enough (and there is no evidence to indicate any "funding") to be able to "invest millions". They operate out of a suite in an office park outside Atlantic City NJ. (I think it's a great company by the way I just don't think they are investing millions it doesn't make any sense given what I know about them.)
- showerst 14y agoLinode has over 45,000 customers (as of 2011), paying a bare minimum of $20 usd/month. Realistically they're probably bigger than that now, and the avg $/customer is higher. I'd say they're pretty good sized. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/8/prweb8739680.htm http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/8/prweb8739680.htm
- larrys 14y ago"Linode has grown to over 45,000 customers" I'd like to point out as someone that has made the INC 500 list and knows the process very well that there is no vetting to the numbers that you give them. Back when I did it you simply needed a letterhead from your accountant and Inc went with whatever you said. (Might have changed but that's the way it was). There is obviously no audit. And there is no question that people fudge to get on the list in various ways because it's a good marketing tool. Linode is not a public company releasing information. Once again I'm not saying the info isn't correct and that they don't have that many customers. I'm simply pointing out that the fact that they issue a press release saying they have 45,000 customers (along with the math that you are assuming gives them $20/customer) isn't necessarily correct.
- agwa 14y agoLinode has been around since 2003 and only made the list for the first time in 2011, which happens to be right after several years of massive growth in the industry. It seems quite plausible that they would legitimately make the Inc 500 list. Another way to approximate their number of customers would be by IP address assignments: http://bgp.he.net/search?search[search]=linode&commit=Search http://bgp.he.net/search?search[search]=linode&commit=Se... I count 176,640 IPv4 addresses, and that's only direct allocations - their older customers are still using IP addresses owned by Linode's datacenter vendors (SoftLayer, HE, etc.). If what you say is true, I have no doubt that some companies fake it to get on the Inc 500 list, but given the facts about Linode it seems fairly unlikely that they faked it, and quite possible that they could be spending millions on infrastructure upgrades.
- derengel 14y agoI must admit Linode IO is pretty bad, :~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=3k oflag=dsync && rm test 3072+0 records in 3072+0 records out 201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 41.3478 s, 4.9 MB/s this a 512MB Linode but still... I hope they fix this with the new hard drives
- zxer 14y agoanother datapoint: Linode 512: 3.96647 s, 50.8 MB/s DigitalOcean 512: 5.87315 s, 34.3 MB/s (though the digitalocean one feels much snappier)
- jebblue 14y agoHere's what I got: <code> 3072+0 records in 3072+0 records out 201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 5.52118 s, 36.5 MB/s </code>
- RKearney 14y agoI got this 201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 3.05352 s, 65.9 MB/s Atlanta, GA
- agildehaus 14y agoOn my 512MB Linode, repeating this command 10 times: 74.5, 70.5, 55.4, 56.1, 84.8, 75.1, 73.7, 58.0, 67.5, 61.8 Average of 67.7 MB/s Dallas
- csomar 14y agoTried with 4 tests (512Mb instance) and I got quite different results (though nothing like 4.9 MB/s) 201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 4.08309 s, 49.3 MB/s 201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 5.22498 s, 38.5 MB/s 201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 5.85255 s, 34.4 MB/s 201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 2.94301 s, 68.4 MB/s
- JshWright 14y agoI wonder if this means an upgrade to security procedures and host operating systems?
- moe 14y agoPfff. Try harder linode. # grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo cpu MHz : 3922519.116 cpu MHz : 3922519.116 cpu MHz : 3922519.116 cpu MHz : 3922519.116 That's on a rackspace small instance. 4000 GHz, baby!
- jebblue 14y agoThat's only 4 cores. I'd rather have the cores.
- rektide 14y agoThey could flip a switch tonight and tell you you've got 128 cores. That doesn't mean those cores are going to do you any good. Linode is the only VPS I've seen that gives a gross number of cores to everyone. Instead of allocating a cpu count correlated somewhere along side plan-tiering, they just give everyone a lot of CPUs (8), and then they use tiers to determine priority, who gets to actually use those cores. An entry level plan has 1/16th the CPU priority of a top tier user, and pays 1/16th as much and has 1/16th as much ram. If you're not RAM bound, for a somewhat loaded system you'll see slightly better than linear scaling (since you aren't paying as many context swaps) as you move up in tiers. I think it's a really bad policy to give entry level users scheduling on so many cores: their workloads will never stick on a local cache! Their jobs are going to be bouncing around the system getting evicted from everywhere and bouncing to the next place where they can trash it's cache next. This is a marketing gimmick, a "our number is higher" trick, played on people like you jedbblue! Some time in the past: the Pentium IV netburst core was going to hit 4GHz, then 5GHz. The mhz wars were on, mhz sold, they were what people saw, first and foremost, and it's more the fact that the insanely-deeply-pipelined core didn't even scale that scrapped the idea than people wizening up. I'm not sure if Linode's scheme here is as bad as all that, but it seems unnatural to me, and I certainly would not consider 8 cores to be a boon in this circumstance. Edit- this does change things a good bit! A quote from elsewhere in this thread I was not aware of- We limit the number of Linodes placed on each host machine. We also only place one plan type on each host. In the worst-case scenario, you're splitting CPU time evenly with your fellow Linoders, but are still able to use the full potential of the host if others are idle. This is a little different circumstance than what I'd guessed at above as you're not going to be outclassed by higher tiers, you just have to play with peers, and pay to have less of them.
- derengel 14y agoA problem with linode is they don't charge by the hour.
- josephb 14y agohttp://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-am-i-billed http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-am-i-billed "This will issue a pro-rated credit to your account" It's not per hour billing as such, but if you spin up Linodes and cancel about X hours/days you do get the leftover fees prorated against your account.
- hhw 14y agoThe E5 came out last March, is based on the previous Sandy Bridge architecture, and is hardly new. It was also practically a year late, launching the same time as the Ivy Bridge based E3 v2's. The 55xx series was launched in Q1 2009, and the 56xx series was launched in Q1 2010, so their existing hardware is 4 years old at this point. Yes, this is a major improvement, but in reality, they are simply catching up to last year's hardware, not exactly being innovative. The claim that their average hardware will be less than a year old when their upgrade is complete comes off as deceitful PR spin. The E5's are already a year old now, so they must be basing the age of the hardware on when it was purchased, and not when it was released to market. The Ivy Bridge based E5 v2 is also coming out in Q3 this year, and supposedly with 12 core models, so it seems that this is a somewhat poorly timed upgrade on Linode's part. They should have either upgraded to the E5 v1's much sooner, or just wait it out for the E5 v2's.
- ksec 14y agoExactly my thoughts. The Ivy E5 is just so much better in Power/Performance. I dont understand why they need to update now, not Earlier or later.