Forum host upgrade - proposal

[Alexandru Ardelean]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 6:18 AM Etienne Champetier
<champetier.etienne at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Tess,
>
> First thanks for all the work !
>
> Le sam. 10 août 2024 à 11:54, Ted Hess <thess at kitschensync.net> a écrit :
> >
> > Hi all -
> >
> > Those of you who visit the forum have probably noticed its, sometimes
> > extreme, sluggishness over the last several months. Since April, I have
> > worked on and applied a number of attempts at tuning, cleanup and
> > storage re-arrangement to try and alleviate these issues. As best as I
> > can determine, we have have just simply exceeded the capacity of the
> > current Droplet CPU and RAM. To upgrade to a system with 2X CPU/RAM
> > (4vCPU/8GB -> 8vCPU/16GB) will increase cost from $48/mo to $96-112/mo.
> > The difference in cost is a "Regular Intel" vs "Premium Intel"
> > processors. The Premium (latest Xeon) option will provide enhanced NVMe
> > SSDs which would improve DB performance (a bit). I think it would be
> > worth $112/mo for maximal impact on the responsiveness of the forum. AMD
> > vs Intel - cost is the same. AMD may be slightly higher GHz.
>
> How up to date is the wiki infrastructure page
> (https://openwrt.org/infrastructure#servers) ?
> Is Digital Ocean still offering some credits ?
>
> At 48$ on DO website I see we are talking about 'basic droplets', i.e.
> shared CPUs,
> so the first question is how much cpu steals time do you see ?
> If we see high cpu steal time, it might be better to go dedicated
> (general purpose) with the same size rather than bigger.
>
> For the SSD performance (high IO wait ?)
> I have no idea if you are using the local storage for the DB and if
> that would help on DO, but sharing just in case.
> If TRIM is not used/can't be used (RAID card/how DO does the
> virtualisation/...),
> I've seen SSD crawl to 1/10 of their performance after some time.
> A trick is to fill your partition free space with 0s multiple times,
> if the SSD firmware is smart enough it'll do a trim for the blocks
> where you put 0s.
> (dd if=/dev/zero of=/bigfile status=progress; rm -f /bigfile)
>
> To throw more power at the problem, another solution is renting bare
> metal servers.
> For example at OVH, If you look at a SYS-6-SSD-128, for $64.99/month you have
> - AMD Epyc 7351p - 16c/32t - 2.4 GHz/2.9 GHz (same generation as DO
> non premium / x8 vCPUs)
> - 128GB DDR4 ECC 2400MHz (x16 mem)
> - 2× 500GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID (??)
> - 500Mbps unmetered internet connection
>
> The big catches I can think of:
> - you pay 1 month installation fee so you can't easily change sizes
> - storage is not flexible at all
> - no easy full system backup / snapshots
> (I'm a happy OVH customer for years / not affiliated)
>

I was going to reply earlier, but I wasn't around my computer, and the
GMail client won't allow for plain-text message formatting.
But to also add to Etienne's suggestion: I (personally) started seeing
that DO isn't quite the cheapest solution (as they used to be many
years ago).

OVH seems interesting (btw).
In our region, hetzner.com is popular for dedicated hosts.
And they're also offering VMs now (apparently).

I'm not saying to use hetzner.
I'm just wondering, if switching providers works (without much extra
effort), seeing as that there seem to be cheaper alternatives (that
DO) now.
And DO doesn't seem to be too cheap anymore.

> Best
> Etienne
>
> > Are there any objections / reasons why we shouldn't go ahead and do the
> > upgrade. There are a couple of methods available however, the down-time
> > will probably be 1-3hrs. if no problems. This isn't the first system
> > upgrade we have done, so I expect no issues.
> >
> > If any of you wish to see some of the forum performance stats, I can
> > post another message with numbers and personal observations. A quick
> > overview of what our daily forum activity looks like:
> >
> > * Serving 120-160K page views. (about 25% attributed to crawlers - a
> > different discussion)
> > * 6-8K mail messages generated
> > * ~1100 User visits (signed-in)
> > * ~200 engaged users (liked or posted)
> > * ~500 new posts
> >
> > Footnote on bandwidth usage... (DO charges bandwidth on aggregate
> > Droplet use)
> > Proposed Droplet upgrade will add 3TB to our total.
> > I don't have per-Droplet stats, but last month we transmitted ~29TB of
> > our 25TB allowance. A $40 overage cost.
>
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