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7 seconds to fill your 10GB VPS
Initial software RAID0 array test of 4x Intel 520s.
dd if=/dev/zero of=sb-io-test bs=1M count=10k conv=fdatasync 10240+0 records in 10240+0 records out 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 6.99275 s, 1.5 GB/s
Might actually be faster if I enable hardware RAID, but it's 6:30PM now and I want to get out of office :)
Edit: Hardware RAID0 at 1.3GB/sec, so it's slower. Linux rox?
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Going Singapore next week and I heard hardwares are cheap there. What's the market price for 520s there?
Singapore has cheap hardware? Since when?
Lol no.
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Cheap? No way. The only things I buy locally are stuff I want warranty on, everything else I shop on ebay.
http://www.tradepac.com.sg/
They have cheap pricing most of the time so it's a good reference, but their support is "meh" unless you know them well enough. 520 240GB are S$330 a pop, about US$264. Newegg is US$250 so yeah, definitely not cheaper.
Hardware is just as expensive here as it is elsewhere, if not more >_>
hell no cheap? you got the wrong place. its very expensive
the only cheap thing related to singapore is airplane ticket from my country...
In the trade shows (commonly called PC Shows) you can get some good deals.
Like this one was being sold at S$99 ($79.41) only (Brand New).
Plane ticket price itself yes, but Singapore's airport tax isnt' cheap.
If you want cheap Hardware you don't want to shop in Singapore. You want to go to Kuala Lumpur (HDDs, CPUs, General components), Hongkong (everything/general) or Shenzhen (China) (everything that is produced in China) for that.
Isn't everything in Hongkong replica's?
For example when looking for Laptop chargers they seem to be based in HK but when they come after the 31days worth of shipping its a like clone of the real thing.
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That sucks. Now I don't know what to spend on in Singapore.
@cosmicgate: Food. But that itself is expensive as well heh.
Most clones are reproductions but some clones are the originals with the manufacturer's logo, so they are pretty decent. Problem is discerning which is which. Avoid if it looks dodgy. For chargers, the heavier/denser the better generally, same rule for power supplies.
Food, and only local food. Avoid anything that originates from other countries unless you never intend to go to that country. Singapore is a food haven because there's almost every cuisine somewhere and it's usually decent but usually nowhere near the real thing, so you're getting anywhere between 60-80% of the real taste. We import a lot of ingredients as well as spices so taste is close, just not authentic enough. Most of the time I blame the meat, our meats don't taste as good in general.
Stay away from retail shops that have stuff you have in your own country. Property/land is expensive so it results in higher rent, that effectively translates into higher costs of retail products. We don't manufacture much in Singapore, so most goods are imported, price won't be much cheaper than wherever you're from.
Enjoy the food, enjoy the sights, enjoy the people, but stay away from shopping unless it's a non-tourist area. If you see a shop/restaurant/eatery with many locals queuing/buying, that's where you go to get your bang for buck. There's nothing Singaporeans are better at than getting the most value out of their money, and we're always willing to queue to get it.
absolutely noooo hahaha Sometimes we can get AirAsia ticket only around 500k IDR to singapore or kuala lumpur.. That even cheaper than us (Indonesian people) traveling to our own country island. ex : Borneo, Sulawesi, and worst Papua (around 3 million IDR).
yummy food comes first :) its not expensive if you know where to eat..
:)
But if you come to SG... You need to spend a lot of money! Expensive!
Heh, I'm always interested in cheap and good food, but since the company has been paying for most of my food expenses...
yeah. only the air - yickets are cheap :) once you are in changi airport that is a different story :)
Well.. you can always spend your money at Geylang
JK
please dont finish all of the expenses , if not you no money pay for the bills. but no worries Mr. Walker will help you =)
and get free STDs? :( food is more worth it
I'm talking about MR >_>
:)
Are there any places in particular to go for food in Singapore? Now that shopping is out of my list, I don't know where to go anymore other than universal studios. (my gf and I will be there for 4days)
Depends where you buy...
go to Batam or any other Riau islands province. :P
Depends on what kind of food you like. Usually we choose by country (eg. jap/chinese/indian/malay/others), then from there decide where to eat. But for tourists I generally recommend a few things that are must-try. I'm not sure where you're from (abit lazy to search) but I'm just going to list a few local stuff that you really need to try.
1) (Local-Chinese) Chicken Rice, it's almost everywhere you go, just stand for 5 minutes during lunch hour and compare the traffic in front of the store vs other stores around. If it's good traffic, they have good chicken rice. 2) (Local-Chinese) Char Kway Teow, there are a few well known stalls. This blog (http://ieatishootipost.sg/) lists some of the best ones. They require a bit of traveling via cab, but it's worth it. 3) (Local-Indian) Roti Prata, it's almost everywhere. There are a few in the shopping centres even, and those are decent and always have a long queue. Good stalls hard to come by, refer to blog if you're willing to hunt. 4) (Local-Chinese) Sambal Sting Ray, basically BBQ Sting Ray with chilli. Order a bowl of rice to go along and it'll be perfect, the rice helps reduce the spiciness of the chilli.
If you are moving around on your own and love food, read the food blog I posted and try marking down some of the stuff that you're willing to travel to try. Then just take a cab to your destination, taking note to avoid peak hours. Never travel on cab between 5:30pm-7:30pm on weekdays, you're better off reaching your destination by 5pm and walking around instead of getting stuck in traffic while the cab meter runs it's worth.
dont miss bakut teh : http://ieatishootipost.sg/2012/08/rong-cheng-bak-kut-teh-every-day-is.html '
i guess someone here can be your tour guide :) dont miss our local foodies :)
okay, back to on topic.. :D
i'm more curious to the type/brand of "hardware" you're using now.
Earlier testing was done on a i3-540 on a LSI 6G raid card. I've moved it to a spare SM E3-1230 board I found lying around so I'm doing some tests now with the onboard 2x SATA3 vs LSI's SATA3. The LSI card is cacheless so that's probably why mdraid performed better. I'm still hunting around for a good SATA3 raid card, most of them are too expensive to buy and screw around with.
Look for Coffee Shops / Eateries / Kopitiams around for cheap and good food. You'll also have more choices. You will also find them in large shopping malls.
This has changed. After 6pm to midnight you need to pay extra 25% surcharge throughout the week.
@cosmicgate, you can refer this website for taxi fare details.
I'd recommend you to travel in Bus / MRT. That will save you a lot. Buy a Ez-Link card and it will help you save even more.
It isn't the surcharge that's the problem, it's the traffic. Assuming @cosmicgate will be staying close to the city (since that's where most hotels are), during those times the traffic can be horrible and getting stuck in a jam isn't just wallet bleeding, but he's wasting precious time as a tourist as well. :)
cab would be better. because he is new ...
it might be cheap but it would be confusing for them
I also wanted to alert him. In case he travels in cab after 7.30pm he'll surely get chopped. :)
Agreed. :)
yes. they will chop tourists
They can't, it's metered fare.
yeah that's the problem :( but still awesome :D
Not good enough, I wanted to hit 2GB/sec (drives rated for 500MB/sec). Tested individual drives now, no difference on LSI or onboard SATA3, each drive can do about 400-420MB/sec so 1.5GB/sec looks like my limit for now unless I go pick up a few more SSDs.
Don't even think about it.. that would be a bottleneck somewhere, processor, or memory.. :P /jk
Improved performance with 2x SSD onboard, 2x SSD on LSI. Write at 1.6GB/sec (close to previous though), read at 2GB/sec. I think I need more SSDs, LOL.
Just some updates, probably more relevant to providers than users.
Did tests with flashcache at this point. Applied flashcache on a single drive, backed by 1x or 4x RAID0 SSDs. Performance on flashcache for read was fixed at about 340MB/sec regardless of 1x or 4x drives. Write performance however improved up to 800MB/sec on 4 drives, but even a single drive achieved a good 400MB/sec. However, considering these SSDs were easily capable of 500MB read/write each, there's a heavy drop in speed when using them for flashcache.
IOPS was where the setup shined. ioping results on flashcache vs SSD(s) were pretty close within 5% margin. Single drive itself only pulled about 65 IOPS (Seagate 250GB, so that's about right). 4x SSD RAID0 did 10k IOPS as per my above reply, so flashcache's improvement on IOPS is solid, but in terms of transfer speeds it didn't reach the maximum potential of the 4x RAID0 SSD.
Since the results were really odd, I did a further test. 1x SSD flashcache 3x SSD RAID0. Single SSD performance was 500MB/s write, 428MB/s read, 8k IOPS. 3x SSD RAID) was 1.5GB/sec read/write, 11k IOPS. With flashcache, the SSD performance became 857MB/sec write, 375MB/sec read, 9.9k IOPS. Increase in write speed, drop in read speed, minor increase in IOPS.
The other thing I investigated was some members commenting about my server's IOPS results. IOPS reached easily past 10k, usually between 15-18k IOPS. However, these are only running 6x 1TB RAID10 drives, no SSD involved, not to mention the results beat an array of 4 SSDs RAID0. Only possibility at this point is the RAID controller's cache. How will the RAID controller perform if I throw in an SSD, I have no idea now but I'll probably try it out sometime soon when I dump one of these SSDs into a live server.
Sadly the RAID controller I'm using for my SSD tests has no cache, so unless I get my hands on a LSI 9265 or Adaptec 6805 (not recommended by reviews), I probably can't come up with more substantial results. But as it is, RAID cache may be more important than flashcache at this point.
I was thinking of some configuration:
Usually #2 is more expensive than #1, and you only can offer lower disk space with #2, which might turned off some customers. But you got better performance with #2, which might attract some other type of customers, depends on their needs.
I was thinking if it's possible to achieve (and offering a VPS with) HDD-like disk space and SSD-like performance, but with around the same cost as #1, while still not losing its redundancy aspect. That's why I proposing #3 as an idea, although I don't know how well this will works (never tested it).
Besides, if the SSD fails/broken when caching and you need to replace it, then would that means breaking the redundancy idea of 2 Raid1 HDDs? Or is there such a thing as 2 Raid1 HDD + 2 Raid1 SSD caching? Or we can just trust the idea that SSD will gives more consistent lifespan compared with HDD due to SSD doesn't has mechanical parts? Or you can turn-off and on caching on-the-fly without rebooting server?
So in Kenshin case, to achieve a lower cost, maybe 4 Raid10 HDDs + 1 SSD caching might gives roughly same performance compared with your current 6 Raid 10 HDD?
Sorry if my thoughts is wrong, because I haven't read any article / scientific test regarding this. But I have this kind of thought because if there's some VPS provider who can offer SSD-like performance VPS with high disk space, that would be nice!
I think quite a number of VPS providers are implementing 4x RAID10 + SSD caching already, but I don't think any of them have posted actual benchmarks so I'm experimenting on my end.
In terms of costs, 4x RAID10 HDD + 1 SSD is pretty close to 6x RAID10. With the benefits of the SSD IOPS and RW speed, I'd say it's a good and cheap solution. SSD are much hardier than HDDs, so far out of all the SSDs I deployed for office use (all my office PC run on SSD for higher productivity) only 1 failed and it was due to firmware issue which Intel updated but we didn't patch till after the issue occured. That case was a total data loss though.
SSD caching is pretty decent based on my tests, but nothing beats the raw power of pure SSD themselves. If I'm going to launch an SSD product, it'll likely be RAID0 with daily backups to HDD. The failure rate of SSDs is really low and since the total capacity is rather small (4x 240GB < 1TB), a daily rsync during off-peak hours would make the most sense since SSD reads are cheap and fast. I never found RAID10 on SSD worth it's costs. On HDD the biggest killer is sector failure due to media, aka bad sectors. If you use the same brand/type SSDs they have the same write-wear, which is the major killer in SSDs. On a RAID10 with the same write patterns, if they fail they'll fail at the same time together, quite pointless.