11 March 2009
bottleneck-free hosting!
Posted by Norman under: Uncategorized .
2 months ago, we tried the new 24-core servers (and have been silently selling hosting accounts on them), although the performance was exceptional but there were some bottleneck.
on a server that hosts hundreds of websites and a lot of services (Apache, MySQL, mail, loggers, spam tools, backup,..etc) there are 3 things that affect performance:
- CPU power
- RAM
- DISK I/O
by time we could avoid troubles with the first two factors (or bottlenecks), CPU power and RAM .. simply .. we got more RAM, got modern CPUs and we are done .. it’s more of a financial issue than technical to get expensive hardware and be able to re-sell it with a good margin.
only disk drives I/O was the real challenge, Imagine the mechanically-functional hard drive trying to deliver files to users, write DB entries, compress files for backup, all at the same time on a non-stop basis for months! the only thing we can do is to spread the I/O load over the day, like running backup at night and not running I/O consuming processes simultaneously .. like backup and stats builders… but still, there is a limit or I/O will slow down the server performance no matter whatever amount of RAM and CPU is used.
and finally, today we are trying the same 24-CORE servers with Solid State hard drives! (namely Intel X25-E SLC drives), if you googled ‘Solid states benchmarks’ you will find amazing results, if you really do not want to read a lot of geeky details, check this short video on youtbue.
anyways, I hope we can post our benchmarks here before the end of the week and I’m sure that last bottleneck will be eliminated soon :)