Many web hosting shoppers are weary of VPS (Virtual Private Server) solutions that are touted as offering the performance of a dedicated server but as a software instance. High end Virtual Private Servers can usually outperform an entry level dedicated server but everything is relative.
I decided to do some benchmarks today to identify the performance indicators and compare it to one of my traditional desktop systems. Three benchmark runs were done, with the average results chosen of the three benchmarks.
The results below were produced by an AMD Athlon X2 5200+ with 2 Gigabytes of memory and a run of the mill SATA 7200 RPM hard disk. It had Ubuntu 32 Bit 10.04 installed:
BYTE UNIX Benchmarks (Version 4.1-wht.2)
System — Linux 2.6.32-14-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Sat Feb 20 05:38:50 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
/dev/sda7 77813696 63782568 10078340 87% /
Start Benchmark Run: Tue Jun 15 13:39:58 CAT 2010
13:39:58 up 15:43, 2 users, load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.01
End Benchmark Run: Tue Jun 15 13:50:31 CAT 2010
13:50:31 up 15:53, 2 users, load average: 18.72, 7.08, 2.99
INDEX VALUES TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX Dhrystone 2 using register variables 376783.7 11393094.3 302.4 Double-Precision Whetstone 83.1 1269.0 152.7 Execl Throughput 188.3 7209.1 382.9 File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 2672.0 131291.0 491.4 File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1077.0 46040.0 427.5 File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 15382.0 772334.0 502.1 Pipe-based Context Switching 15448.6 411501.4 266.4 Pipe Throughput 111814.6 1580693.0 141.4 Process Creation 569.3 20060.0 352.4 Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 44.8 900.8 201.1 System Call Overhead 114433.5 2763156.4 241.5 ========= FINAL SCORE 289.6
The results below are from our Silver VPS line, featuring Virtuozzo virtualisation. The VM was installed with CentOS 5 64 bit with cPanel and sports 512 Megabytes of memory.
BYTE UNIX Benchmarks (Version 4.1-wht.2)
System — Linux 2.6.18-028stab067.4 #1 SMP Thu Jan 14 17:06:11 MSK 2010 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
/dev/vzfs 31457280 9656548 21800732 31% /
Start Benchmark Run: Tue Jun 15 09:58:08 EDT 2010
09:58:08 up 23 days, 10:43, 2 users, load average: 0.02, 0.03, 0.00
End Benchmark Run: Tue Jun 15 10:08:13 EDT 2010
10:08:13 up 23 days, 10:53, 2 users, load average: 19.44, 7.53, 3.12
INDEX VALUES TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX Dhrystone 2 using register variables 376783.7 21662200.7 574.9 Double-Precision Whetstone 83.1 1217.9 146.6 Execl Throughput 188.3 7482.7 397.4 File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 2672.0 245885.0 920.2 File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1077.0 68374.0 634.9 File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 15382.0 2397244.0 1558.5 Pipe-based Context Switching 15448.6 256611.7 166.1 Pipe Throughput 111814.6 3229997.3 288.9 Process Creation 569.3 25387.6 445.9 Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 44.8 2504.2 559.0 System Call Overhead 114433.5 3037263.6 265.4 ========= FINAL SCORE 431.6
You may be wondering why the VPS performed so well. The result can be explained because of the Equal – Share CPU setup and SAS 15 000 RPM RAID-10 disk configuration. Each VPS node consists of at least 16 CPU cores of 2.2 GHz and you can attain very high speeds with these configured for Equal Share. When you couple that with the I/O performance of the disk configuration, you can see why there is a huge difference in the score, in spite of available memory.
Want to try benchmarking your machine? Feel free to download the modified BYTE Magazine benchmark here
To install:
# tar -xzvf unixbench-*-wht.tar.gz
# cd unixbench-*-wht-2 ; make
# ./Run
Let me know if there are any specific benchmarks you want to see. The next batch of benchmarks will comprise of Xen based virtual machines, as well as more multi – threading intensive tests.