Tag Archive - sysbench

Rackspace Cloud Servers, US vs UK

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

Amazon EC2 Micro instance, how fast is it?

Today, Amazon announced a new instance type for EC2. I micro instance with 613MB memory and a starting price of $0.02 per hour. But how fast is it?

I’ve previously benchmarked Amazon EC2 and Rackspace, and here comes a new quick-and-dirty performance test using SysBench. The following products where tested.

Product CPU Memory Disk Price
Amazon EC2 Micro 1-2 virtual core 613MB N/A (uses EBS) $0.02 per hour
Rackspace Small 4 virtual cores 256MB 10GB $0.015 per hour

Servers where running Ubuntu 10.04 64bits, tests where performed on two different servers, average scores where used. Here’s the results, less is good.

Product SysBench CPU Sysbench Memory Sysbench File I/O
Amazon EC2 Micro 197.6s * 2635.1s 6.7s
Rackspace Small 7.9s 336.8s 57.3s

* I did manage do boost this down to 35s one run, since bursting is allowed for shorter periods. The following two runs took around 200s.

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

Conclusion

According to SysBench, Rackspace is much faster then Amazon EC2 when it comes to CPU and Memory tests. Amazon EBS is however much faster then the Rackspace storage.

Rackspace Cloud vs. Amazon EC2

Rackspace Cloud, or Amazon EC2, which is best? This is just a quick performance comparison using SysBench. The following products where tested.

Product CPU Memory Disk Price
EC2 Small Instance 1 virtual core 1,7GB 160GB $0.085 per hour
Rackspace 256MB 4 virtual cores 256MB 10GB $0.015 per hour
Rackspace 1024MB 4 virtual cores 1GB 40GB $0.065 per hour

Servers where running Ubuntu 9.10 i386, tests where performed on two different occasions, average scores where used. Here’s the results, less is good.

Product SysBench CPU Sysbench Memory Sysbench File I/O
EC2 Small Instance 29.7s 491.3s 28.6s
Rackspace 256MB 5.6s 219.1s 26.4s
Rackspace 1024MB 4.1s 196.1s 17.8s

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

Conclusion

According to SysBench, Rackspace Cloud is much faster then EC2 in general, and cheaper as well. EC2 however comes with more memory and disk.