Tag Archive - rackspace

AWS Route53 vs Rackspace Cloud DNS

July 8, 2011 in Cloud computing, DNS with 9 Comments

Yesterday, Rackspace announced their new Cloud DNS service. This is clearly(?) a response to Amazon’s Route53 release a while back. With one big difference; Rackspace Cloud DNS is free (in combination with other Rackspace Cloud Products), whereas Route53 is not.

I’ll admit I haven’t tried the Rackspace service (yet), but here’s a quick comparison table anyway. Some questions (about branding and distribution) I couldn’t find answered on the Rackspace information page, so I used the support chat.

  Amazon Route53 Rackspace Cloud DNS
Management API* API*
Distribution Anycast** Anycast***
IPv6 - Yes
DNSSEC - -
Branding - -
RR Types A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SPF, SRV, TXT & “Alias”**** A, AAAA, CNAME, DKIM, MX, NS, SPF, SRV & TXT
Pricing Cheap Free

* Neither Amazon nor Rackspace has a management interface for the DNS services. DNS30 is however availible for Route53.
** 19 locations on 3 continents
*** 3 locations on 2 continents (see comment below)
**** Alias records are used to map resource record sets in your hosted zone to Elastic Load Balancing instances.

If the choice only stood between Route53 and Rackspace I think I’d go with Rackspace, just because of the IPv6 connectivity. But other providers should also be considered, Zerigo for example has an excellent DNS service.

Update: After the comment below by Daniel Morris at Rackspace I tried to contact the chat support again to get the information about the edge locations. Here’s the response:

Agent: I’m sorry but I am not positive I would recommend contacting the support team at 1-877-934-0407 or 0800 054 6345 | +44 20 8734 4345
Agent: I’m sorry for any inconvenience this has caused
Agent: have a great day

Not very impressed wit this fanatical support, to be honest.

Quick and dirty WordPress speed comparison

July 6, 2011 in Benchmarks, Web hosting with 0 Comments

This is just a quick benchmark of WordPress release 2.8.6, 2.9.2, 3.0.6, 3.1.4 and 3.2.

The test was done on a 512MB rackspace instance, running Ubuntu 10.10. With the following packages installed with default configuration: libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server php5-mysql. Benchmark was done with ab, doing 10 000 requests to the front page, over 10 concurrent connections.

This is the result, in requests delivered per second:

Clearly, speed isn’t that much improved with the release of 3.2. However, this benchmark only tested the front page with the sample post.

WordPress 3.2 beta 1 speedtest

May 14, 2011 in Benchmarks, Web hosting with 1 Comment

With every new WordPress release, things seems to be getting slower. But not anymore? With the release of WordPress 3.2 developers state that performance is getting better.

The test was done on a 512MB rackspace instance, running Ubuntu 10.10. With the following packages installed with default configuration: libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server php5-mysql. Benchmark was done with ab, doing 10 000 requests to the front page, over 10 concurrent connections. Both blogs used the Twenty Ten 1.2 theme, and the supplied sample post.

This is the result, in requests delivered per second:

As you can see, things aren’t any faster, yet. But this is still a beta, and i only tested the performance of the front page, nothing else. I also tried the Twenty Eleven theme, but that wasn’t any faster.

Rackspace Cloud Servers, US vs UK

January 4, 2011 in Benchmarks, Cloud computing with 0 Comments

Today, Rackspace opened up the beta for Cloud Servers in the UK. This is a quick performance comparison with the US cloud, using SysBench.

The test was done using four servers (two on each site, one 256MB instance and one 512MB). All servers ran Ubuntu 10.10.

Without further ado, here’s the results (less is better).

Product SysBench CPU Sysbench Memory Sysbench File I/O
US 256 4.0s 184.5s 22.6s
US 512 4.0s 185.7s 20.3s
UK 256 4.0s 190.2s 21.4s
UK 512 4.0s 191.1s 18.5s

There seems to be good capacity at both sites, performance was almost identical.

The following commands where used to do the benching, interesting values was the total time to run the test.

sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=cpu run
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=memory run
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw prepare
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw run

IPv6 with Rackspace Cloud Servers

January 4, 2011 in Cloud computing, Networking with 0 Comments

Although Rackspace is working on IPv6 support, it’s always nice to be some steps ahead. The following techniques probably works with other providers as well, providing you have enough access to the virtual server. The tests where done using Ubuntu 10.10, but again, should work well with any Linux distribution.

Tunnelbroker provides free IPv6 tunnels (other providers like SixXS exists, but I wont cover them here).

Start by register an account with Tunnelbroker, when that is done login and choose the option Create Regular Tunnel. The form is pretty straight forward.

IPv4 endpoint is the IP address of your virtual server.

I’ve run some tests with MTR to determine which endpoint offers the best latency, and I came up with the following. But you should probably do your own tests.

Rackspace Site Endpoint Hops Latency
United States Chicago, IL, US [ 209.51.181.2 ] 5 2 ms
United Kingdom London, UK [ 216.66.80.26 ] 5 2 ms

Rackspace peers directly with HE/Tunnelbroker both in US and UK, that’s why these numbers are quite good.

When this is done, go to the tunnel page and scroll down to the Example Configurations section and choose either Linux-route2 or Linux-net-tools (without knowing exactly why, I’d recommend the route2 method). Run the commands as root on your server.

Now, the IP listed under Client IPv6 address is your endpoint IPv6 address, this can be used for services. It’s also possible to allocate a /48 network, but that’s probably not necessary for a single server.

Try it out by running the following comand.

# ping6 ipv6.google.com
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