Submitted by zzolo on 2010, April 21 - 10:40am
I have always dreamed of going into space. I often ask people if they would go out into space if given the chance; I think it gives a small bit of insight into someone's personality. I doubt I will be able to make it into space in my lifetime, though I think it'll be close. But, if I can't go, this site can still move to Mercury.
Pretty cheesy intro, I know. What this actually means is that I just moved this site from being hosted at DreamHost to Amazon Cloud AWS with Chapter Three's Pantheon Mercury. The main reason to do this was performance, but I will discuss the pros and cons of this switch below.
Performance
I have done some very basic benchmarking with AB (Apache Benchmarking). By no means is this a rigorous test, but it does add some insight into the performance increase. I ran ab from a third-party server that had more consistent bandwidth and each test is for the homepage; I am running a small (default) instance. A very rough way to read all this is to say I get 50x the performance with Mercury.
| Test and Metric |
DreamHost |
Mercury |
Increase |
|---|
| ab -n 100 -c 10 |
|
| Failed requests |
29 |
0 |
~2,900% |
| Requests per second |
0.98 |
19.81 |
2,021% |
| Time per request |
1024.6ms |
50.490ms |
2,029% |
| ab -n 1000 -c 10 |
|
| Failed requests |
321 |
0 |
~32,100% |
| Requests per second |
0.87 |
41.09 |
4,723% |
| Time per request |
1150.489ms |
24.335ms |
4,728% |
| ab -n 1000 -c 50 |
|
| Failed requests |
7 |
0 |
~700% |
| Requests per second |
44.86 |
112.15 |
250% |
| Time per request |
22.292ms |
8.916ms |
250% |
| Average |
|
| Failed requests |
119 |
0 |
~11,900% |
| Requests per second |
15.57 |
57.68 |
370% |
| Time per request |
732.46ms |
21.91ms |
3,343% |
| Increase average |
|
|
5,204% |
