Cloud Performance
December 5, 2009
After the endnote session at the International Online Show, Charlie Hull, Lemur Consulting, and I were talking about various aspects of open source technology. Mr. Hull has a positive view of open source, and I try to be disputatious whenever possible. Since Mr. Hull purchased my hot chocolate (small hot chocolate, in point of fact), I pushed back a bit. I focused on the issue of performance of certain open source software. Committee built gizmos may lack the trim tummies found in some commercial software solutions. I recalled seeing a performance comparison of some open source and commercial cloud solutions, and I said that I would dig up the article and post a comment.
The write up was “VPS Performance Comparison” in the Journal of Eivind Uggedal. You can see what fun it is to have a hot chocolate with a Lemur and a goose! The guts of this quite interesting piece of research are spilled in several charts. The systems put through their paces via scripts and some test data included:
The results, thoughtfully accompanies by some useful fee metrics, were interesting. The data revealed that both Mr. Hull (the modest lemur) and I (the addled goose) were both correct. He and I also like Banksy, the street artist, and we have several other areas of agreement in common as well. Quite depressing I might add.
I want to urge you to read Mr. Uggedal’s essay, so I will point out one chart that I found illuminating:
I know the lines are difficult to see but the point is that Amazon is predictable if pokey. Several vendors consistently lag others and the top performers in this test which is close to a Web application’s load are zipping right along. The speediest, are summed up by Mr. Uggedal this way:
Linode. 32-bit gave the best results on the Unixbench runs while 64-bit was fastest on the Django and database tests.
Quite a nice piece of work. Lemurs and geese agree that analyses like Mr. Uggedal can shed light on certain technical issues. Nevertheless, I assert that a wet goose is more sleek than the average dry lemur.
Stephen Arnold, December 5, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I wish to disclose that I wrote this essay and referenced Lemur Consulting because I was paid off with a cup of hot chocolate. Small cup, mind you. To whom do I report this commercial transaction. I think the US Federal Aviation Administration has jurisdiction over addled geese. Must comply, of course.
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