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Quick review of the FlowVPS BF 2019 VPS
Christmas Day finally came today, the FlowVPS super BF 2019 preorder special has been provisioned. For those not aware or need reminding, here's the deal:
4 vCPU
4GB RAM
15GB NVMe - Primary
100GB SSD - Secondary (Not bootable)
1.5TB Data
1 IPv4
Some extremely lucky people got this for $15AUD/qtr, and various discounts until the regular $45AUD/qtr price (or $120AUD/year) which you can still get here: https://billing.flowvps.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=28&billingcycle=annually
$10 AUD per month for those specs is insane (that's about $7 USD) and considering the fact that it's in Melbourne, Australia on an extremely nice network and a location that's suitable for Australians, this is a steal. Just based on those facts alone, this is already exothermic potassium in my books.
On to the initial benchmark:
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Region: Global https://bench.monster v.1.4.9 2019-12-24
Usage : curl -LsO bench.monster/speedtest.sh; bash speedtest.sh -Global
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OS : Debian GNU/Linux 9 (64 Bit)
Virt/Kernel : KVM / 4.9.0-6-amd64
CPU Model : QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.5+
CPU Cores : 4 @ 2599.998 MHz x86_64 16384 KB Cache
CPU Flags : AES-NI Disabled & VM-x/AMD-V Disabled
Load Average : 0.14, 0.05, 0.01
Total Space : 113G (1020M ~1% used)
Total RAM : 3955 MB (46 MB + 304 MB Buff in use)
Total SWAP : 255 MB (0 MB in use)
Uptime : 0 days 0:13
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ASN & ISP : AS136557, Host Universal Pty Ltd
Organization : FlowVPS
Location : Melbourne, Australia / AU
Region : Victoria
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Performing Geekbench v4 CPU Benchmark test. Please wait...
## Geekbench v4 CPU Benchmark:
Single Core : 2375 (GOOD)
Multi Core : 8623
## IO Test
CPU Speed:
bzip2 : 79.5 MB/s
sha256 : 150 MB/s
md5sum : 397 MB/s
RAM Speed:
Avg. write : 1464.4 MB/s
Avg. read : 3857.1 MB/s
Disk Speed:
1st run : 445 MB/s
2nd run : 436 MB/s
3rd run : 368 MB/s
-----------------------
Average : 416.3 MB/s
## Global Speedtest
Location Upload Download Ping
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speedtest.net 909.58 Mbit/s 936.92 Mbit/s 1.764 ms
USA, New York (AT&T) 22.32 Mbit/s 16.03 Mbit/s 211.567 ms
USA, Chicago (Windstream) 30.53 Mbit/s 99.00 Mbit/s 235.874 ms
USA, Dallas (Frontier) 47.90 Mbit/s 87.48 Mbit/s 234.247 ms
USA, Miami (Frontier) 67.58 Mbit/s 113.34 Mbit/s 209.820 ms
USA, Los Angeles (Spectrum) 67.37 Mbit/s 134.28 Mbit/s 228.332 ms
UK, London (Community Fibre) 11.81 Mbit/s 69.93 Mbit/s 288.074 ms
France, Lyon (SFR) 18.50 Mbit/s 45.81 Mbit/s 298.372 ms
Germany, Berlin (DNS:NET) 19.98 Mbit/s 49.83 Mbit/s 293.129 ms
Spain, Madrid (MasMovil) 14.36 Mbit/s 49.04 Mbit/s 288.049 ms
Italy, Rome (Unidata) 18.68 Mbit/s 49.62 Mbit/s 275.746 ms
Russia, Moscow (MTS) 17.13 Mbit/s 42.69 Mbit/s 330.809 ms
Israel, Haifa (013Netvision) 15.31 Mbit/s 35.96 Mbit/s 352.838 ms
India, New Delhi (GIGATEL) 111.37 Mbit/s 300.88 Mbit/s 162.172 ms
Singapore (FirstMedia) 180.25 Mbit/s 164.40 Mbit/s 82.545 ms
Japan, Tsukuba (SoftEther) 22.34 Mbit/s 64.39 Mbit/s 244.249 ms
Australia, Sydney (Yes Optus) 683.76 Mbit/s 797.53 Mbit/s 12.575 ms
RSA, Randburg (Cool Ideas) 8.16 Mbit/s 12.11 Mbit/s 451.473 ms
Brazil, Sao Paulo (Criare) 12.64 Mbit/s 28.84 Mbit/s 328.557 ms
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finished in : 12 min 10 sec
Timestamp : 2019-12-31 07:01:08 GMT
Saved in : /root/speedtest.log
Share results:
- http://www.speedtest.net/result/8902506887.png
- https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15089465
- https://clbin.com/RkoAD
Sweeeeeet! I love the network. Anyone in Australia understands how shitty the overseas connections can be, but this is a very decent indicator of the best possible speeds that are possible to the tested locations. Singapore in particular is excellent, I think there must be some very premium routing to get that through Perth instead of the long way around.
If you're in SGP, this is an amazing choice for you to locate your servers.
I'm going to use this as a small Plex VPS, hooked up to an unlimited google drive account, and set up rclone cache on the secondary drive. The goal would be to have a fine tuned Plex instance that my family can use, while being mindful of the shared resources (CPU and Network)
The first thing you will need to do after logging into your VPS is to set up the secondary disk. Use your favourite tool to do that, I just used fdisk and mkfs.ext4 and an entry in fstab. If that went above your head, I'll follow up in this thread with a step by step, so please let me know if that would help.
I do plan to document my usage of this VPS, since it's quite unique to me in the location, network, premium FlowVPS and insane price, and hopefully someone can benefit from my experiences.
If anyone can find a 4 vCPU/4GB RAM/115GB of SSD and 1.5TB of data in Melbourne for $10 AUD I'll eat my shorts. Even $20 would be pushing it. A bargain at twice the price.
I suggest to anyone who missed this, or who is savvy enough to recognize a good deal to buy this while you still can. The provider is premium, the network is premium, the offer is premium and the price is insanely cheap. Worst case and I give up on Plex, I'll still keep it idling forever
Comments
I too use FlowVPS and have grown to be friends with trewq over the past year or so. The support you receive is personal, he cares if something is wrong and will try and fix it for you.
If you need a good AU VPS at a good price, this is your place.
Yup, I'm so lucky.
Absolutely true!
@trewq is sooooo friendly, his support is top notch! I submited a ticket to ask for his recommendation and set it in low priority because I know it's new year holiday, everyone is busy atm. BUT, I got my ticket solved in few minutes!
VPS is running smoothly, network is prem, support is top notch!
I will setup Plex server on this VPS (never used Plex before). @dahartigan do you have idea to use Onedrive 1TB account with Plex since I dont have Unlimited Gdrive
If rclone supports onedrive then it should work :-) It basically mounts cloud storage as a directory, for example /mnt/onedrive and then you point plex to that "folder".
100% agreed with everyone about the support, he really does work hard to have great customer service with a personal touch.
Wow! Nice network for asia.
It looks like it’s supported https://rclone.org/onedrive/
Do you have guide to setup and optimize Plex server or just apt install and mount.
That was quick! Plan to set up my VPS tonight.
My advice would be to install rclone first, then set up onedrive with it. Once you're comfortable with that, install Plex, then after that combine them. Baby steps :-)
I don't have a guide ready to go, but it's something I will write up and post here when I get the chance.
As for optimizing Plex, the biggest impact comes from transcoding - if your clients can direct play, you can in most cases force it. If transcoding is needed (which is normal) then limiting the source files to lower bitrates/qualities can help, after that it's fine tuning.
If you can get rclone set up and install plex, the rest will come as needed. I honestly hope that helps you :-)
@trewq know's how to deploy some BANGING HARDWARE. I will one day get one of his prem VPS's. But he is PREM.
Thanks @dahartigan and everyone else for your kind words. Happy New Year!
Here's another bench with the CPU flags passed through. It also reveals that the processor is an E5-2630 v2 which is actually a really decent processor. A little birdie tells me the node has 2 of these in it
I've transferred my Plex over to see how it performs. So far I'm seeing impressive results :-) The connection to Google Drive is actually faster than what I can get in LA from a different provider, which is a delightful surprise.
Lately I've been going on an AMD kick but these e5 processors pack some serious potassium and are very strong on the plow.
The network impresses me a lot more than I was expecting, but that makes sense because trewq runs his own network and fine tunes his peering in a proactive way. Probably why gdrive is so fast..
If the deal is still active and you don't have one, I urge you to snap one up before the regret kicks in :-)
Looks like premium APAC location
Waiting for 15 deal
Dont wait! It wont come back!
Ok then I won't wait
I'd love to see it come back, but I think we'll probably see flying cars and IPv6 in CC before that happens
Super premium actually. I think most people outside of Australia wouldn't have heard of Melbourne as it's not as famous as Sydney, but it's in a location that makes it really well connected to all of Australia and the APAC region in general.
If you want a good connection to SGP on a powerful server then get this before it's too late. I found that the link for $45/qtr paid quarterly is still valid if you didn't want to go yearly: https://billing.flowvps.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=28&billingcycle=quarterly
That’s about 31.5 US Dollars per quarter, you may want to check with @trewq about the 10 percent GST/ tax that gets added. If that is a must pay even for non Australia folks, that will push it to nearly 12 US Dollars a month. Still a good deal for the specs!
This powerful box is so smooth.
I also love mine - it gives me maj0r b0nar
With FlowVps, you go with the flow!!
Can you please post a
fio
benchmark? I tried FlowVPS around a year ago and had an issue with very slow disk I/O - my nightly Borg backups were totally killing performance, and Debian package installs/updates were very very slow.dd
didn't really show the issue as sequential reads/writes were okay-ish, butfio
random read/writes did show it. I ended up moving to a different provider.Seems like it might be fixed on newer nodes, given your positive results. In that case I might try FlowVPS again.
Will do, give me a little bit to organise that and I'll reply back here with the results.
I definitely haven't noticed any sort of performance issues with the storage, so it's possible that it was either isolated or something that's no longer an issue.
@Daniel15 This first result is from the nvme drive and the second result is for the secondary ssd drive.
First run on NVMe
Second run on SSD:
Looks pretty performant to me, perhaps I missed something though, so if you have a particular fio command you'd like to see the results for let me know.
I PM'd @Daniel15 with my results - NVMe only - keep forgetting the SSD. :-)
Edit: Posting the results
`fio --name=randwrite --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=1 --rw=randwrite --bs=4k --direct=0 --size=256M --numjobs=8 --runtime=30 --group_reporting
randwrite: (g=0): rw=randwrite, bs=(R) 4096B-4096B, (W) 4096B-4096B, (T) 4096B-4096B, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=1
...
fio-3.12
Starting 8 processes
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 256MiB)
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 256MiB)
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 256MiB)
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 256MiB)
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 256MiB)
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 256MiB)
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 256MiB)
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 256MiB)
Jobs: 7 (f=7): [w(2),_(1),w(5)][88.9%][w=113MiB/s][w=28.0k IOPS][eta 00m:03s]
randwrite: (groupid=0, jobs=8): err= 0: pid=818: Fri Jan 3 20:22:01 2020
write: IOPS=21.5k, BW=83.9MiB/s (87.9MB/s)(2048MiB/24417msec); 0 zone resets
slat (usec): min=10, max=205236, avg=347.00, stdev=4295.80
clat (usec): min=3, max=40040, avg= 6.79, stdev=162.34
lat (usec): min=15, max=205246, avg=357.08, stdev=4300.63
clat percentiles (usec):
| 1.00th=[ 4], 5.00th=[ 4], 10.00th=[ 4], 20.00th=[ 4],
| 30.00th=[ 5], 40.00th=[ 5], 50.00th=[ 5], 60.00th=[ 5],
| 70.00th=[ 5], 80.00th=[ 5], 90.00th=[ 6], 95.00th=[ 7],
| 99.00th=[ 16], 99.50th=[ 23], 99.90th=[ 89], 99.95th=[ 188],
| 99.99th=[11994]
bw ( KiB/s): min= 2240, max=85660, per=12.27%, avg=10535.51, stdev=12365.05, samples=383
iops : min= 560, max=21415, avg=2633.84, stdev=3091.27, samples=383
lat (usec) : 4=25.25%, 10=72.61%, 20=1.58%, 50=0.38%, 100=0.09%
lat (usec) : 250=0.05%, 500=0.01%, 750=0.01%, 1000=0.01%
lat (msec) : 2=0.01%, 4=0.01%, 10=0.01%, 20=0.01%, 50=0.01%
cpu : usr=2.90%, sys=7.92%, ctx=9484, majf=0, minf=83
IO depths : 1=100.0%, 2=0.0%, 4=0.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
issued rwts: total=0,524288,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0
latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=1
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
WRITE: bw=83.9MiB/s (87.9MB/s), 83.9MiB/s-83.9MiB/s (87.9MB/s-87.9MB/s), io=2048MiB (2147MB), run=24417-24417msec
Disk stats (read/write):
vda: ios=0/140000, merge=0/64648, ticks=0/98908, in_queue=99004, util=86.50%`
Would you mind sharing them here too? I also wonder if we both just smashed the drives at the same time right now? lol I only did the extra fio test on the SSD because I felt it would be a complete picture of the situation.
Having SSD as a secondary storage is actually premium really, usually it's HDD (sometimes local, otherwise a network storage)
EDIT: I'm going to throw this out there, but if anyone is reading this who has one of these deals but you aren't using the SSD because you're not sure how to set it up, please let me know (you can PM if you like) and I'll put a step by step in here on setting it up.
@dahartigan can run two more fio tests with the following flags instead:
--bs=64k
--bs=256k
Just to see how the drives perform when stress tested.
Sure thing sir.
NVMe 64k
NVMe 256k
Want SSD too?
SSD 64k
SSD 256k
I have updated my above post with the results.
Below is the test using the same parameters you used: 64 K This is NVMe
fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --readwrite=randrw --rwmixread=75 --bs=64k
test: (g=0): rw=randrw, bs=(R) 64.0KiB-64.0KiB, (W) 64.0KiB-64.0KiB, (T) 64.0KiB-64.0KiB, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=64
fio-3.12
Starting 1 process
test: Laying out IO file (1 file / 4096MiB)
^Cbs: 1 (f=1): [m(1)][27.0%][r=3008KiB/s][r=47 IOPS][eta 13m:26s]
fio: terminating on signal 2
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [m(1)][27.0%][r=769KiB/s][r=12 IOPS][eta 13m:28s]
test: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=988: Fri Jan 3 20:52:28 2020
read: IOPS=44, BW=2851KiB/s (2919kB/s)(832MiB/298721msec)
bw ( KiB/s): min= 125, max=419712, per=100.00%, avg=5701.31, stdev=36947.02, samples=298
iops : min= 1, max= 6558, avg=88.52, stdev=577.36, samples=298
write: IOPS=14, BW=944KiB/s (967kB/s)(275MiB/298721msec); 0 zone resets
bw ( KiB/s): min= 127, max=142818, per=100.00%, avg=7846.41, stdev=24391.01, samples=71
iops : min= 1, max= 2231, avg=122.11, stdev=381.17, samples=71
cpu : usr=0.17%, sys=0.29%, ctx=3719, majf=0, minf=8
IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.1%, 4=0.1%, 8=0.1%, 16=0.1%, 32=0.2%, >=64=99.6%
submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.1%, >=64=0.0%
issued rwts: total=13307,4407,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0
latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=64
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: bw=2851KiB/s (2919kB/s), 2851KiB/s-2851KiB/s (2919kB/s-2919kB/s), io=832MiB (872MB), run=298721-298721msec
WRITE: bw=944KiB/s (967kB/s), 944KiB/s-944KiB/s (967kB/s-967kB/s), io=275MiB (289MB), run=298721-298721msec
Disk stats (read/write):
vda: ios=13415/4479, merge=0/57, ticks=10303152/8055552, in_queue=18390320, util=100.00%
Also, I have posted my BM results (YABS, behcn.sh, nench.sh, Speedtest) on underworldstartup . Will update it later.