

Nginx Requests/Second - Raspberry Pi vs. Amazon EC2 - mmastrac
http://www.chimerasaurus.com/2013/01/nginx-requestssecond-raspberry-pi-vs-amazon-ec2/

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kayoone
The follow-up is much more interesting:
[http://www.chimerasaurus.com/2013/02/raspberry-pi-vs-
aws-v2-...](http://www.chimerasaurus.com/2013/02/raspberry-pi-vs-aws-v2-0/)

However, the only thing this shows is that AWS micro instances are really
slow. In the follow-up the author argues that while a small instance is much
faster, its also much more expensive. While thats true i dont get the point,
the pi is just not a good choice as a public webserver and if you were to use
it that way you would need to co-locate it and costs would probably be
comparable.

If on the other hand, you use both enviroments for heavy computing purposes it
doesnt make sense to bill the EC2 instance with 24/7 as it probably would not
need to be on all the time.

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mrkmcknz
Duplicate: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5083172>

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dzent
I'm really not sure why people keep using micro for benchmarks. Its CPU gets
throttled to hell if it gets pretty much any load at all.

~~~
whalesalad
You're right. But... if you've ever used a Raspberry Pi as any kind of modern
web server, you'll realize just how slow it is. Compile ruby on a modern PC vs
a Raspberry, and it really forces you to remember that this is a tiny litte
ARM device for fun projects + experiments, and not mean't for a rails stack
(as an example).

My point is not to knock the Raspberry, rather, this demonstrates just how
pathetic an Amazon Micro instance is. It's abysmal to the point that you have
to ask yourself why they provide them at all. It's like they're teasing us,
"Here, a free server! Enjoy it!" but in reality you'd rather drink a shot of
drano full of nails because it's so painful to work with. Then again, beggars
can't be choosers and free is free.

~~~
frehpt
I think you're missing the point of the micro instance. It can give you decent
performance in short bursts, which is suitable for many light usage cases e.g.
a low traffic blog. If you are going to load it via a benchmark you get very
heavily throttled way below the performance you would get with light usage.

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hardwaresofton
So one EC2 server might be drasticatlly slower than a raspberry pi, but isn't
part of the attractiveness of cloud services like EC2 that there's replication
and load balancing with no headaches? now if you build a modular, distributed
load balancing replicated network of 10~20 raspberry pis, that all outperform
the EC2 servers... that might warrant replacing EC2 with raspberry pis.

That actually sounds like a pretty awesome project... I might do that some
day.

~~~
frehpt
It's only drastically slower because the micro instance gets very heavily
throttled when you put it under sustained load. If you use it for what it's
designed for the performance is much better as you don't get throttled with
light usage. The benchmark is of the slowest ec2 instance type while being
heavily throttled due to the benchmark generating too much load.

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meritt
If you need any additional proof that EC2 instances are abysmally slow (at all
cost tiers) just look at
<http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r4> and compare m1.large
versus dedicated hardware.

~~~
frehpt
I don't see how that proves anything. They're using an old first generation
instance type and benchmarking it alongside a much more powerful i7 processor.
If you want a faster instance get a second generation instance or a larger
one.

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mikro2nd
Sadly the link to the followup (<http://www.evilsoapbox.com/wp-
admin/post.php?post=1612>) fails with a database authentication error.

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ck2
Here you go:

[http://www.chimerasaurus.com/2013/02/raspberry-pi-vs-
aws-v2-...](http://www.chimerasaurus.com/2013/02/raspberry-pi-vs-aws-v2-0/)

The dynamic link, ie. ?p=1234 has to be served dynamically but the static slug
can be served by supercache or similar.

What I find far more fascinating:

    
    
        EXT3: 329.83 requests/sec
        EXT4: 484.27 requests/sec
    

ext4 is 30% faster than ext3? Really? What's going on there...

~~~
itry
Strange indeed. Why is the disk accessed in the first place? For a site like
this, I would expect all content to be cached in ram all the time.

