We run a number of applications on physical servers now, whose job is to generate a lot of graphics-rich PDF documents. We're trying out some quite powerful (2Gb) Linode machines and seeing how they stack up against physical ones. The CPU performance is good but the jobs seem to absolutely crawl - 20x slower than on a real machine.

Is Linode known to perform badly when writing to disk? e.g. are we sharing the disk capacity with all other users on the machine? Is there any kind of performance tuning which can be done?

Thanks,

Andy

Yes you're sharing the physical hard disk with other users, if memory serves linode uses 15k rpm sas drives in raid 10 so hardware wise it's as good as it's going to get without going solid state.

Setting noatime in /etc/fstab can increase performance a bit I've also found that ext4 has performance improvements over ext3 but you have to partition the space yourself.

Disk IO does tend to be a bottle neck on all vps services if you can avoid writing to disk until you really have to, manipulate your data in memory then write when it's done.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue