Upgrading Linode

I've been happily hosting my various PHP/nginx websites and occasional crazy Node.js application on a Linode 1024 VPS for the last couple years. Recently I've been looking into AWS and other VPS/PaaS providers for side projects and figured I should check out what I was getting from my Linode.

Interesting. Apparently I haven't upgraded or performed a reboot on my VPS in a long time.

I believe these changes also included some SSD upgrades as well as a NIC overhaul. The vCPU “upgrade” from 8 cores to 2 is of course an obvious drawback. However, after doing some quick research, people were reporting before and after benchmarks having the same quality, as if a vCPU was more likely to be dedicated to one owner. The RAM usage was the most appealing as I barely touch bandwidth, so I figured it was worth the risk of upgrading.

Pre-Upgrade Benchmark (8 x vCPU)

$ siege -c 20 -r 100 https://thomashunter.name
** SIEGE 3.0.5
** Preparing 20 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege.. done.

Transactions: 4000 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 412.95 secs
Data transferred: 7.33 MB
Response time: 1.49 secs
Transaction rate: <strong>9.69 trans/sec</strong>
Throughput: 0.02 MB/sec
Concurrency: 14.48
Successful transactions: 4000
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 6.76
Shortest transaction: 0.15

Post-Upgrade Benchmark (2 x vCPU)

$ siege -c 20 -r 100 https://thomashunter.name
** SIEGE 3.0.5
** Preparing 20 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege.. done.

Transactions: 4000 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 254.19 secs
Data transferred: 7.33 MB
Response time: 0.72 secs
Transaction rate: <strong>15.74 trans/sec</strong>
Throughput: 0.03 MB/sec
Concurrency: 11.28
Successful transactions: 4000
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 2.85
Shortest transaction: 0.15

Conclusion

The number of transactions per second went up by 50%! The concurrency went down a little (less cores for handling concurrent processing), but that doesn't matter too much for a web server. As you can see in the image above, the CPU utilization went down a decent chunk as well.

The upgrade is definitely worth it. Fear not the reduced core count.

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.