Scaleway
2015-10-09 17:15:15.540189+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments
A few thoughts on Scaleway servers:
This new pricing lets you enjoy Scaleway services at the smartest price on the market, for €2.99 per month you get a 4 true cores server with 2GB of memory, 50GB of SSD and 200Mbit/s unmetered bandwidth.
At current exchange rates, this is less than $3.50/month. The 4 cores are ARM, and of indeterminate speed. I had been running this site on a Linode server, 25MB of SSD, a gig of RAM, and an Intel VM of indeterminate speed.
The code that runs Flutterby hasn't really changed in somewhere around a decade. There's been a tweak or two, but the core ran back then, and continues to run. It relies on PostgreSQL. Sooo...
| Test | Linode | Scaleway |
time ~/websites/flutterby.com/public_html/archives/viewentry.cgi id=150 > /dev/null | 0.232 | 1.374 |
time ~/websites/flutterby.com/public_html/archives/viewentries.cgi fromdate=2015-09-01 todate=2015-10-01 > /dev/null | 1.8 | 15.4 |
time psql flutterbycms <<< 'select * from articles join users on users.id=articles.author_id join weblogentries on weblogentries.article_id=articles.id where weblogentries.id >= 100 and weblogentries.id <= 5000' > /dev/null | ~1 | 9.5 |
time perl -le ' = 0; for (0..9999) { for (0..9999) { ++ } };' | 4.5 | 51.8 |
Note that the web site load seems to be very much helped by mod_perl, because the site doesn't feel that slow (and "shift+reload and counting Mississippi concurs), although the compute and I/O heavier test of loading a month's worth of archives gets slower in the web page.
Also, on that load the month test, there was quite a bit of time not accounted for by user or sys, so there was likely a bunch of I/O, and Scaleway's "SSD" is probably just "SD".
The extra RAM is nice. I got indeterminate GCC errors when trying to compile http://www.trustiosity.com/snow/ on the Linode box that seemed to be related to out of memory, and sure enough, it got past that stage on the Scaleway (there are other problems there...).
Scaleway does their networking with an IPv4 private network, exposing the devices you want public via some sort of NAT, and they don't have IPv6 yet. The ARM core means a few things are weird, you have to recompile any C or C++ you're going to run on them, and you have to jump through a few hoops to get UFW working right...
I'm still trying to decide how valuable my private web presence is these days. I also know that in an hour or three I could cache a bunch of Flutterby to make it serve faster.
And I'm thinking about what a < $3.50/month "cloud" machine means for the mythical Facebook killer.