Tag: EC2

Benchmarking AWS ARM Instances Part 1

As AWS have made the t4g.micro instance free until the end of June, it’d be a crime to not test them out. My test comparisons will be between two burstable small instances, the sort you might use for a small website, a t3a.micro and a t4g.micro, and for pure CPU benchmarking, larger general purpose instances, a m5.2xlarge and a m6g.2xlarge. The ARM instances here run on the AWS Graviton processors and AnandTech have a fantastic writeup on them.

So diving straight into my admittedly small and basic benchmarks, the first test I ran was an ApacheBench test against a website being served from each instance. In this case I replicated this site to a LEMP stack on the instance and ran against that, and again the command ran is below:

ab -t 120 -n 100000 -c 100 https://www.test-site.com/

t3a.micro ApacheBench
Requests per second: 14.95 #/sec
Time per request: 6690.257 ms
Time per request: 66.903 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1626.65 [Kbytes/sec] received

t4g.micro ApacheBench
Requests per second: 24.65 #/sec
Time per request: 4057.414 ms
Time per request: 40.574 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 2680.52 [Kbytes/sec] received

m5.2xlarge ApacheBench
Requests per second: 67.22 #/sec
Time per request: 1487.566 ms
Time per request: 14.876 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 6876.10 [Kbytes/sec] received

m6g.2xlarge ApacheBench
Requests per second: 67.88 #/sec
Time per request: 1473.144 ms
Time per request: 14.731 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 7502.57 [Kbytes/sec] received

The performance difference here on the smaller instance types is incredible really, the ARM instance is 64.8% quicker, and these instances cost about 10-20% less than the equivalent Intel or AMD powered instance. For the larger instances the figures are so similar I suspect we’re hitting another limiting factor somewhere, possibly database performance.

Next up was a basic Sysbench CPU benchmark, which will verify prime numbers by calculating primes up to a limit and give a raw CPU performance figure. This also includes the larger general purpose instances here too. The command used for this is below, with threads to match the vCPU in the instance:

sysbench cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --threads=2 --time=120 run

t3a.micro Sysbench
CPU speed: events per second: 500.22

t4g.micro Sysbench
CPU speed: events per second: 2187.58

m5.2xlarge Sysbench
CPU speed: events per second: 2693.14

m6g.2xlarge Sysbench
CPU speed: events per second: 8774.13

As with the ApacheBench tests, the ARM instances absolutely wipe the floor with the Intel and AMD instances, and they’re 10-20% cheaper. There’s no wonder AWS are saying that the Graviton 2 based ARM instances represent a 40% price-performance improvement over other instance types.

Based on this I’ll certainly be looking at trying to use ARM instances where I can.

Experimenting with & Moving to AWS – Part 2

This is a follow up to my previous post – Experimenting with moving to AWS

All went well with AWS Lightsail, it’s a very serviceable VPS solution, but now I’ve had a bit of time in AWS I’ve migrated the site further to EC2. It was a simple enough process, snapshot the Lightsail machine and export that as an EC2 AMI and EBS snapshot, and then cloned the whole lot from London to Ireland. The move of regions was because I have some other data already in Ireland and wanted to keep the site in the same region now.

Off the back of all that I’ve got my IPv6 connectivity back to the site again, as Lightsail does not support IPv6 addressing, which is a bit of a negative point there of Lightsail. EC2 instances however, most certainly do support IPv6.

I’ve also gone as far as migrating DNS management into Route53 from Google Domains, mainly to simplify managing the domain zone.

The instance type the site is now running on is also one of the newer AMD EPYC EC2 instance types, which work out slightly cheaper than the equivalent Intel instances, so keep an eye on the instances suffixed with “a”, as you can save a bit of money there.