
Nginx Requests/Second – RaspberryPi vs Amazon EC2 - chris_j
http://www.evilsoapbox.com/?p=1607
======
chaz
EC2 micro instances throttle down very heavily if you use CPU for more than a
few seconds at a time. Other instances allow you to burn 100% CPU all day, but
not the micros.

[http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-
instan...](http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instance-cpu-
steal/)

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recuter
Also, with spot pricing you could run a micro instance for 18 months for the
price of a Pi and you don't need to wait for it to be shipped to you. :)

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borlak
You can lose your spot instance at any time if you are outbid...

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jvc26
Google Cache link -
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.evilsoapbox.com/?p=1607)
currently main content not working for me.

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simontabor
Very unfair to be using a t1.micro instance, they're only meant to give very
short bursts of power and don't give any dedicated hardware (so giving the
hardware specs is pointless).

Do a new benchmark comparison vs a m1.small and it'd be interesting. I bet the
small wins by an absolute mile.

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CCs
The blog is called Evil Soapbox. Why do you expect it to be fair? :)

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CJefferson
This is interesting. One obvious question, although a little tricky to test.
Did the raspberry pi get an advantage by being in the same room as you?

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damian2000
If I'm not mistaken the performance test software used is running on each
machine locally and just hammers the web server with local requests?

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FiloSottile
Already down with 502. <joke> Was the blog hosted on the RPi? </joke>

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StavrosK
Even worse, EC2! :p

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stesch
Worse: nginx/0.8.53

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pbhjpbhj
Why is that, why are Amazon running it on that server, is it their choice?

[http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://evilsoapb...](http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://evilsoapbox.com)

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Nikkau
A blog is nearly a read-only webapp, it's the easiest type of website to
scale.

If you can't avoid 502s with trafic HN can make, you should'nt do benchmarks
about hosting matter.

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Groxx
While true, it generally means buying bigger hosting / moving to a new
provider / some significantly-manual step. If they haven't done it before, it
could be _hours_ before it's completed, if they're even aware of it yet.

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antihero
No, because a static content blog can be served directly from memory. You
could probably handle HN traffic on anything.

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Groxx
"Can be" does not mean "is". Unless it is built to do so, why expect it to?
You have no idea what they're running, nor on what kind of machine or
bandwidth allotment, why are you making these huge assumptions and insulting
people who don't meet them?

~~~
antihero
Well if you have a blog about performance, you'd think their site was
performant.

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Groxx
Why? Maybe they optimized for their own performance (put words online) instead
of (buying, configuring, and) over-building their server. What if they're not
a sysadmin? What if they hate sysadmin work? Seriously, it's a _wordpress_
site.

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bencevans
Text only Cached Version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JCuNKYQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JCuNKYQ8IGkJ:www.evilsoapbox.com/%3Fp%3D1607&hl=en&tbo=d&gl=uk&strip=1)

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cbg0
There is a bit of overhead since you are in a virtualized environment on EC2,
plus the "micro" instance does not really give you a dedicated processor core
- you're sharing CPU time with other instances.

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jkat
We just finished doing some video encoding testing on a few different platform
and EC2 (along with EC2-based offerings) are considerably slower and more
expensive. Although 10x more expensive than a 3930K, a cc2.8xlarge instance
was only 1.75x faster.

~~~
cjg_
Comparing cost of a cpu vs price of running an EC2 instance (and over what
time)? Bit strange...

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dragontamer
How about comparing EC2 to a Virtual Private Server? Thats a bit more of an
apples-to-apples comparison.

Serverbear notes that Amazon 7.5GB Large instances (which cost $180+ / month)
benchmark at ~650 on Unixbench... with 30 MB/s for its disk. In comparison, a
8GB VM from Digital Ocean only costs $80/month. I don't have the numbers for
the 8GB VM, but the smaller $20/month 2GB instance has a UnixBench of ~1900
with over 300MB/s I/O from its solid state drive.

(I presume the larger instances have more CPU power / priority in the VM
scales)

That is half the cost for triple the CPU performance and 10x better disk
performance. Other smaller providers, such as RamNode, offer extremely fast
I/O with RAID 10 Solid State Drives in their Virtual Private Servers (500+
MB/s).

Amazon vs Digital Ocean

serverbear.com/239-large-amazon-web-services

serverbear.com/1990-2gb-ssd--2-cpu-digitalocean

To be fair though, Amazon's CPUs are more consistent... consistently bad, but
consistent. VPS CPUs and I/O are affected by their neighboring VMs, while
Amazon seems to have removed that uncertainty. Nonetheless, in practice, you
will always get a better performing CPU and I/O from other providers.

And if we compare both to bare metal servers, obviously bare metal servers win
in price/performance, but are harder to maintain, so its hard to do an apples-
to-apples comparison. But Digital Ocean VMs can be spun up/down just like
Amazon instances... although Amazon has more load balancers and other
infrastructure. (But nothing is stopping you from setting HAProxy on a front-
end VM to loadbalance a cluster of VMs from Digital Ocean. Even then, other
VPS providers like Linode offer Load Balancers as part of their infrastructure
now)

Its hard for me to see the case for Amazon's cloud offerings. They don't have
very much price/performance at all. At all ends of the spectrum, low end to
high end, VPS providers such as Digital Ocean offers more vertical scalability
as well as a cheaper price on all of Amazon's offerings.

Unless you need some specialized VM from Amazon (ie: GPU compute), or are
locked into their vendor-specific API (oh I feel sorry for you), there is no
reason to use Amazon's services IMO.

~~~
noelwelsh
In the next few months we will be migrating a number of servers to EC2. The
only reason is to take advantage of latency based routing -- we really really
need to reduce latency as far as possible.

Anyway, there's your reason.

The other reason is that big businesses just don't care. Margins are high
enough on software that cost of EC2 over another provider is outweighed by the
benefit of existing infrastructure, developer experience, and the risk
limitation by choosing AWS.

~~~
dragontamer
Fair enough. I consider that part of the "specialty" kind of service however.
I still wouldn't touch their S3 compute stuff though, even if I'd use Amazon's
DNS services. I know that you can use Amazon's CDN with other provider's VPSes
or your own dedicated boxes somewhere.

And certainly, for the small 2 or 3 server clusters that a small startup uses,
Amazon's prices are much significantly higher than other providers.

Anyway, I'd have to check out the latency based routing thing, and how it
differs from typical Geo DNS or "Anycast" DNS that is offered by a number of
providers. My bet is that its just Amazon marketing speak for GeoDNS or
Anycast technology.

EDIT:
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/Cre...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/CreatingLatencyRRSets.html)
As far as I can tell, Amazon's "Latency based Routing" is just GeoDNS with
much better marketing name. Its all about reducing latency, but at the end of
the day, it is no different from GeoDNS.

That said, Route53 does seem to be a good DNS service from Amazon. $0.75 per
million anycast queries per month + $0.50 per zone is a good price methinks.

So while I'd never use a compute instance at Amazon, I probably definitely
keep their Route53 service on my list. Looks pretty nice from what I can tell.

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ck2
_File-System: ext4_

Why would you use a journaling file system on a sd card?

Actually I take that back, I was not aware ext4 performance has been improved
over ext3 and even ext2

and apparently in ext4 you can even turn journaling off entirely.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes, you can turn the journaling off. You can do that in ext3 as well (ending
up with 'ext2')

But maybe JFFS2 or similar 'flash file systems' can be better depending on the
use, not sure how the state of these kind of file systems are

~~~
simcop2387
Generally you never want to use JFFS2 or other flash file systems on a flash
device that has a separate controller. this is because their own wear leveling
will usually confuse the hell out of the controller and can sometimes cause it
to either slow down or to lower the life because the controller will not level
things properly. Whether ext4 or not is better than say XFS for this, no clue
though.

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loeg
Fwiw, CascadeLink is a high-speed apartment building ISP in the Seattle area
(or at least, I that's why I recognize the name). Some of my friends get 30/30
for $40/mo.

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feralmoan
Can you turn off rate limiting so we can read the story

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Hengjie
Or just put it on EC2 instances. :P

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mariusbutuc
Guess what, 502 Bad Gateway!

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mocko
I get "502 Bad Gateway". Oh the irony.

~~~
dragontamer
He is running his site on an Amazon Micro Instance. He probably should switch
over to his Raspberry Pi so that he can handle 50% more load.

