Big RAM increase, how will you use it?

@sblantipodi:

I'm thinking to add a virus filter to my email server and you?

I may switch to xubuntu or kubuntu as my GUI desktop for remote software development. Right now I'm using IceWM since it is so very light on memory consumption at 5.8 Meg resident, but the menus do not automatically sync with ubuntu.

James

http://zunzun.com

Bump up APC's and MySQL's cache sizes a bit, and leave rest to the disk cache. ;)

Yeah I'm going to undo the memory changes I made to /etc/mysql/my.cnf and bump that sucker back up.

:)

Thanks to suggestions in this thread, I've also bumped up my mysql cache settings.

Happy 7th Birthday Linode :D

Probably mysql as well, the rest to be left as a cache.

So, no new additional service on your node with a big improvements like that?

After reading these posts, how does one bump up SQL and the disk cache? Which settings are you all going to look at?

I just rebooted a few minutes ago.

@sblantipodi:

So, no new additional service on your node with a big improvements like that?

Not at the moment, I'm sure in a few weeks I'll find something new to experiment with.

@obs:

@sblantipodi:

So, no new additional service on your node with a big improvements like that?

Not at the moment, I'm sure in a few weeks I'll find something new to experiment with.

if you want, remember to share this experiment with us. :)

@lighthammer:

After reading these posts, how does one bump up SQL and the disk cache? Which settings are you all going to look at?

I just rebooted a few minutes ago.

Here you can find a simple guide on how to do that,

don't use big numbers when caching mysql if you have no reason to do it.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/enable-th … mance.html">http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/enable-the-query-cache-in-mysql-to-improve-performance.html

Disk caching?

You can't manage/configure it, in few words, the free ram is used to cache something that may be useful by the system because free ram is wasted ram.

I will use it… to take over the world!

… and also mysql/ apache :)

@sblantipodi:

So, no new additional service on your node with a big improvements like that?

Well, yes and no. No new processes running, but it'll definitely allow me to hang more web apps off it while keeping the performance as it was before. ;)

I will install Jetty or Tomcat (I am still deciding and I am opened to suggestions) in order to use Solr in my Drupal sites. I also installed nginx as a front-end for apache with mod_php and I am very close to buy a new linode and spread out my applications on both of them.

@nofun:

I will install Jetty or Tomcat (I am still deciding and I am opened to suggestions) in order to use Solr in my Drupal sites. I also installed nginx as a front-end for apache with mod_php and I am very close to buy a new linode and spread out my applications on both of them.

yes, I will try to switch to tomcat, this is in the kitchen but it will require a lot of work.

will you buy a second linode for redundancy only?

I'm also thinking to buy a second node to be located in europe.

I was thinking of creating an "in house" cdn solution with another server in UK and GlusterFS.

My zimbra install will now have some breathing room, what a memory hog that thing is!

ns1.jonfoster.org

ns2.jonfoster.org

using NSD 3.2.4

I've been thinking about that. I'm considering simplifying my configuration by scrapping nginx, which I was using to buffer the result of dynamic php requests proxies to apache and serve static files directly. That scheme wasn't that big a hassle once I got it working but with the extra RAM I can support many more apache workers and still have a larger disk cache while eliminating a source of complexity.

Ad more memory available. What about memcached? Now, we have quite a place even at the lesser linode instances.

Hrmm memcached might be an interesting venture (or possibly redis)

@sblantipodi:

I'm curious to know how you will use the 42% of increased RAM.

What about a VPS within a VPS? Install OpenVZ on my 512MB linode, and then sell 4 100MB VPSes at $8 / month (marketed as "burstable up to 300MB", of course).

Use the profit to buy another linode. Repeat until I'm a millionaire…

Virtualization does not work well inside virtualization.

@cager:

What about a VPS within a VPS? Install OpenVZ on my 512MB linode, and then sell 4 100MB VPSes at $8 / month (marketed as "burstable up to 300MB", of course).

I'm half-considering something like this for a project I'm working on, actually, so don't laugh too hard! In theory, it should work, and it might also be pretty effective and efficient, but with a few caveats:

1) IP addresses. This might be valid justification for additional IP addresses from Linode, but I'd probably check that out before writing up the business plan. Most customers will want a real, public IP address, even at the $8/mo price-point. However, "World's FIRST fully-IPv6 VPS Service!" would probably get you… a couple customers.

2) Kernels. You'd be doing the pvgrub thing, which would make your situation relatively unsupported. Of course, it's not like there are ever any bugs in the kernel, so why worry?

3) Management. Generally speaking, most OpenVZ hosts are probably running dozens of containers, which means providers can grow a fair bit before having to seriously automate things. In this case, with four customers per host, you're going to have to automate the daylights out of things from Day 1. With just 100 customers, you've got 25 OpenVZ servers while Chet Bumpkin's Live Bait and VPS Shoppe has two. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

But you know, like that time someone popped onto IRC and wondered about running Plan9 on a Linode, all I can say is "you're on your own, but let us know how it works!" :-) -rt (paypal me a cut while you're at it)

I believe that everybody who has attempted it in the past has met with strange issues, but it looks like it works with newer versions of Xen:

http://wiki.openvz.org/How_to_use_OpenV … _platform)">http://wiki.openvz.org/HowtouseOpenVZasaXENguestOS(forx86_platform)

I think that Linode is still on Xen 2.x, though, aren't they? Perhaps it will be possible in the future. It's certainly possible to see the advantages of running a small VPS business at Linode, due to the scalability of the cloud-based service, and the ability to use stack scripts to make deploying additional VPS servers extremely fast.

But still… VPS-within-VPS feels… wrong.

UML!

@jed:

UML!

UML is a lot slower than OpenVZ… Note the big performance increases Linode customers saw when the switch from UML to Xen was made!

I've also had limited experience (ie, dabbling if anything) with virtualization outside of Xen, VMWare, and VirtualBox. However, OpenVZ is faster than Xen due to less virtualization overhead, anecdotal evidence from Linode customers (and various documentation on the net saying as much) seems to indicate UML is much slower than Xen, therefore UML is much slower than OpenVZ.

X > Y

Y > Z

Therefore X > Z

I'm not disagreeing that UML doesn't look like the best option for running on a Linode, only that there may be performance concerns.

Linode should find a way to prevent people from doing VPS inside a VPS, it will hurt the overall performance of the physical machines.

The major Linode performance boost from UML to Xen was, if I recall, due to having multiple processors available. I think UML will now do SMP, so it might be worth another look.

Also, as far as performance differences go, anything less than 10% is effectively equal in the real world. I'd consider both Xen and OpenVZ to be within 10% of bare metal performance, with the major differences being unrelated to the system in use. (In other words, a shiny-pants dedicated server on a SAN is going to suck relative to a UML Linode.)

So, uhh, what did I use my RAM for… well, I think most of it went towards cache, but some went towards buffers. :-)

@jebblue:

Linode should find a way to prevent people from doing VPS inside a VPS, it will hurt the overall performance of the physical machines.

Aside from recursive virtualization being impossible to prevent (beyond the limitations of the CPU architecture), how could it hurt performance for other users?

Since it's Friday afternoon and I'm feeling punchy, I'll point out that there isn't that much difference between JVM and UML from a nebulous-diagram standpoint.

@hoopycat:

Since it's Friday afternoon and I'm feeling punchy, I'll point out that there isn't that much difference between JVM and UML from a nebulous-diagram standpoint.

Mmm JVM == Java Virtual Machine? If that's the one you're referring to then there's a world of difference. End of the day a JVM executes just the bare minimum to run a Java app.

The same app let's say written in C++ running on let's say UML now has an entire OS being emulated just to run the app.

How is that not going to hurt performance? I have some background in the virtualization arena but who doesn't.

I guess someone would need to do some measurements but if we combine the two models, and a sub-user (user leasing a VPS running inside a Linode VPS) wants to run Tomcat or (eek, Glassfish or JBoss) to run that same Java app, but the JVM instance is being executed by the whole UML OS on top of the XEN VM running on the host Linode OS … virtualization compounded. Yeah those numbers should look great! :-)

What we really need ;-) is a Java OS which has its instructions run natively on the host CPU. I like Linux but if the OS and the apps and the 'virtual' containers were all Java and the apps running in the containers were Java; that would be cool. No C, no C++, no Perl, no Python, yeah!