Upgrading Linode II: Xen to KVM

It's been a while since my last Linode upgrade (about five months judging by the uptime-o-meter).

This upgrade took about fifteen minutes and from what I can tell resulted in no side effects.

While the last upgrade came with about 60% increase in throughput, this upgrade was closer to 16%. Take it with a grain of salt though; my previous benchmarks were run while using the amazing Webpass ISP whereas these results were done using the ever shitty Comcast connection.

Pre-Upgrade Benchmark (Xen)

$ siege -c 20 -r 100 https://thomashunter.name
** SIEGE 3.1.0
** Preparing 20 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege...

Transactions: 2000 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 265.33 secs
Data transferred: 55.56 MB
Response time: 2.12 secs
Transaction rate: 7.54 trans/sec <--
Throughput: 0.21 MB/sec
Concurrency: 15.96
Successful transactions: 2000
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 3.02
Shortest transaction: 0.66

Post-Upgrade Benchmark (KVM)

$ siege -c 20 -r 100 https://thomashunter.name
** SIEGE 3.1.0
** Preparing 20 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege...

Transactions: 2000 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 227.75 secs
Data transferred: 55.56 MB
Response time: 1.73 secs
Transaction rate: 8.78 trans/sec <--
Throughput: 0.24 MB/sec
Concurrency: 15.15
Successful transactions: 2000
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 2.83
Shortest transaction: 0.63

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.