We’ve been busy over on the
Brightbox tech blog so I thought I’d
do a roundup here.
We’ve been maintaining up-to-date Ruby packages for Ubuntu for several
years now and work continues on it. We have some
pre-release packages for Phusion Passenger 4,
the Ruby (and now Python and Node.js) app server.
Of course we’ve been keeping our
high performance Ruby 1.9.3
packages
updated
too. We
published some tests results
that show some of their memory and cpu improvements.
And most recently we’ve
added support for Brightbox Cloud to Vagrant,
to help developers quickly set up development environments.
And a bonus post about
measuring the shared ram usage of processes under Linux, something that is a bit more difficult than you might expect!
Coming soon
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on some major new Brightbox
Cloud features, so expect those to be announced soon!
posted 23 Apr 2013
by John Leach
In July, the technology review website Phoronix
published several benchmarks
they ran of Ubuntu 12.04 running on Amazon EC2. The benchmarking
software Phoronix used is
open source and it’s easy to
replicate their tests, so we ran them on Brightbox Cloud as a
comparison.
We compared a Brightbox Cloud “large”
server type (8GB RAM, 8 CPU cores) to Amazon EC2’s “c1.xlarge”
(7GB RAM, 8 CPU cores) which are closely equivalent in spec.
Overall results
Each benchmark test is listed with the results for the two server
types. Whenever the score was better, the result is in green (better
might be lower or higher, depending on the type of test).
In the majority of cases, the Brightbox server performs better than
the EC2 server, in some cases significantly better.
A
detailed breakdown of all the results,
including the other EC2 server types, are available on
openbenchmarking.org.
Highlights
I’ve included the graphs for some of the more notable results below.
34% more HTTP requests per second.
The Apache benchmarks show us leading with 34% more HTTP requests
per second. Definitely a good choice for web deployments.
Up to 30% more GraphicsMagick operations per second.
If your web apps are doing image transformations, you’ll be pleased to
see up to 30% more GraphicsMagick operations per second.
Up to 220% faster with NASA supercomputing benchmarks.
Those of you doing heavy computation win out the most, with the
NASA supercomputing benchmarks
coming in at over 220% faster at peak.
27% faster at compiling a Linux kernel.
We’re 27% faster at compiling a Linux kernel, which in itself
probably won’t excite anyone (other than perhaps Gentoo users) but
it’s a good overall test of cpu, memory and disk io.
Our “large” server type comes with 1GB more RAM and is about
£43/month cheaper too. It does have less disk capacity, but our
storage is hardware RAID6 with 15k rpm SAS disks and battery-backed
write cache, giving high performance and high availability.
And as with all Brightbox Cloud servers, you’re not limited to any
particular operating systems. We provide full virtualisation so you
can pretty much run any x86/amd64 OS you want.
Of course, a single set of benchmarks is never enough to draw complete
conclusions, we recommend you test for your own use cases and do you
own comparisons (and do let us know
how you get on!)
posted 20 Sep 2012
by John Leach