Behold, the benefits of virtualization!
I spent most of the evening preparing to move a few websites. I decided to do some benchmarking just to see what sort of improvement I was getting from the new server setup. Although the old server didn't feel slow when browsing sites, the results of the benchmarking were even better than expected.
The old server has 768 MB of RAM, one Pentium 4 processor running at 2.40GHz with
hyper-threading enabled, and an IDE hard drive. It's running an old version of
Fedora, Apache 2.0, and MySQL 4.1. Here's the output (with website name obscured)
from ab:
$ ab -kc 10 -t 30 http://www.03323fdf.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.03323fdf.com (be patient)
Finished 42 requests
Server Software: Apache
Server Hostname: www.03323fdf.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 31366 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 30.625 seconds
Complete requests: 42
Failed requests: 1
(Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 1, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 1327075 bytes
HTML transferred: 1317373 bytes
Requests per second: 1.37 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 7291.637 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 729.164 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 42.32 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 29 34 4.9 33 53
Processing: 3941 5957 1922.5 5550 15562
Waiting: 2715 4097 1737.3 3673 13459
Total: 3971 5991 1922.8 5584 15599
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 5584
66% 5805
75% 6341
80% 7012
90% 7531
95% 8759
98% 15599
99% 15599
100% 15599 (longest request)
Wow, that looks horrible, doesn't it? Like I said in the opening paragraph,
browsing the few sites still running on this server does not feel this slow.
Obviously, ab is putting a pretty hefty load on the server.
The new setup uses two servers instead of one. They are running on VMware ESXi
4.1 with 512 MB of RAM, 2 Xeon VCPUs, and paravirtualized iSCSI storage. They are
running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Apache 2.2, and MySQL 5.1. The database and web servers
are running on separate hosts. Here again is the output (with website name obscured)
from ab:
$ ab -kc 10 -t 30 http://www.03323fdf.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.03323fdf.com (be patient)
Finished 368 requests
Server Software: Apache
Server Hostname: www.03323fdf.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 31366 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 30.071 seconds
Complete requests: 368
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 11651553 bytes
HTML transferred: 11562013 bytes
Requests per second: 12.24 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 817.139 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 81.714 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 378.39 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 23 36 26.7 31 230
Processing: 360 768 192.8 750 2227
Waiting: 240 567 174.7 542 2035
Total: 385 803 193.2 785 2263
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 785
66% 833
75% 874
80% 898
90% 977
95% 1052
98% 1259
99% 1723
100% 2263 (longest request)
I think the results speak for themselves...