Daniel Nashed's Blog

Picking the right cloud server hardware

When choosing cloud server hardware, the devil is in the detail.

CPU performance

Cost effective hardware usually uses older CPU models which don't have hardware support for hash and crypto operations.
In modern application communication requires TLS. Also ZFS and other components require hardware support for SHA operations and crypto.

A simple test shows the difference.

openssl speed -seconds 3 -bytes 16384 sha256 2>/dev/null | awk '/^sha256/ {printf "%.2f MB/s\n", $2/1000}'

My older VM cost efficient server at Hetzner doesn't have hardware support for thos operations:

332.13 MB/s

A more modern machine shows dramatically better performance:

1762.05 MB/s

My local Proxmox host on new Intel hardware even has better performance.

2347.82 MB/s

For larger servers with higher load the new modern CPU makes a lot of sense and is good invested money.


Disk performance

Specially for Domino I/O response time is very important for NSF.
Domino uses many small random I/Os and is more read than write bound.

I/O writes are usually very well cached. Reading data can also be well cached if you have sufficient RAM.

But fast SSDs still make a difference as you can see in an earlier test.

Latency is most important for Domino I/O.
Backup operations require high I/O transfer rates.

Cloud providers often provide different levels of disk performance.

• Different storage classes with different disk types
• Sometimes performance is limited by to certain number of IOPS and thruput unless you pay extra
   

When choosing hardware you really need to balance performance vs. price.



--- NVMe internal disk on an older notebook  ---

Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       321.10 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   433.78 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                   97.33 MB/s
Average Read Time with Sequential Writes       0.620 ms
Latency: 95th Percentile                       1.839 ms
Latency: Maximum                              14.415 ms
Average Read Time with Random Writes           0.591 ms
Total Run Time 00:00:40.08


--- NVMe internal disk on my new notebook  ---

Dramatic increase in read and write performance.
Another 10 times better latency as well!

Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       1508.35 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   4414.35 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  1138.50 MB/s
Average Read Time with Sequential Writes        0.081 ms
Latency: 95th Percentile                        0.152 ms
Latency: Maximum                                1.208 ms
Average Read Time with Random Writes            0.084 ms
Total Run Time 00:00:07.33

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