It can be difficult to choose a good Virtual Private Server host with so many different web hosts available. Apart from an earlier post which demonstrated the use of a modified version of UnixBench (https://www.rskeens.com/?p=17), there is another quick and easy way to test a core component of a system: the disk I/O (Input / Output) throughput.

A quick test that I saw on Web Hosting Talk today used:

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

Granted, this is only going to be a rudimentary test of your disk performance, but it can still be worthwhile to check out. My results of a VZ based VPS Node with no free slots are below:

16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.4941 seconds, 307 MB/s

That’s fast considering my desktop with a single disk configuration only gets:

16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 26.4561 s, 40.6 MB/s

Go on, bench your VPS (or desktop!) and see what results you get.