EC2 is twice faster on fresh Ubuntu 16.04 with Moodle... for specs twice lower (but same price)

Hi,

I am running a Moodle instance on a Linode 8GB. I have a page that takes 11s to load (a lot of record, very old Moodle code…). I took this page because I think it is a good example for Moodle performance as it is a Moode core activity.

I first tested EC2 to install a backup of my Moodle site on a Fresh EC2 AMI Ubuntu 16.04 (HVM / ESB / SSD). It is a 2CPU - 4Gb, EC2 instance which basically cost the same as the Linode 8GB.

=> The page loaded in 5s.

I first thought the perf increase was due to PHP7 and Postgres 9.5.

So I create a new Linode 8GB and reproduced the exact same installation steps (apart of a few things like git which was not present, which made me think that EC2 Ubuntu images are optimised/preconfigure). I did install the same version of PHP7, Apache and Postgres.

=> The page loaded in 11s.

Do you think it is due to the Ubuntu image or the EC2 hardware that is more fit for running Moodle (the ESB, HVM stuff maybe…)?

3 Replies

I've never used Moodle before, so it would be tough to tell exactly. The Ubuntu image could have something to do with it, if you want the closest test possible you could save an image of your disk and upload that to Linode directly to ensure it is the same.

What processor is running on your EC2? If you have a 5th generation Linode you should be running around a E5-2680v3, which I would imagine would be stronger than what your EC2 plan is currently wondering. If you don't know what processor that is running but know the ECU, I made a comparison on that to our processors in this article here: https://medium.com/linode-cube/the-powe … .bhh8873z6">https://medium.com/linode-cube/the-power-of-intel-e5-processors-f7f8f3dacb3a#.bhh8873z6

I've been using Moodle on a 6GB Linode. Runs smoothly with PHP 7 (and 5 before that). It ran fine on the 3GB Linode I had before the recent birthday upgrade as well. I know they have optimized the code quite a bit in the newer versions. Do you have theme cache turned on? And are you using any other type of caching on your Linode instance? What version are you using?

Hi,

mkorsak: since my initial post I deleted the EC2 instance. Good point, next time I will retry EC2, I'll copy the EC2 ubuntu image and install it on a linode. I checked, my linode is E5-2680v3 so I now know it is supposed to be the fastest. I will let you know here when I test the EC2 image on Linode.

The Other Air Force: I do not have any issue with Moodle, I was just mentioning it as it is what I was using when I discover such perf difference. I was just surprised that 2 "same" fresh install of Ubuntu had such difference. But thanks for your answer/help nonetheless :)

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