Hi everyone,

I'm a new Linode user, and so far I'm pretty happy with my new toy. Usuability is really good, excepted for one point: I rarely achieve data transfers superior to 200KB/sec. This is especially annoying when doing an apt-get dist-upgrade, and I wonder if this is a kind of voluntary bandwidth limitation, or just my host being slow. I have a linode 128 on host72.

Any performance report would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Alex.

Unfortunately ~200kb/sec seems par for the course. This is what I got with a 30MB test download from a couple of Linode128s last week:

  Fremont (Host19):    183kbyte/sec average, 200kb/sec max.
  Atlanta (Host77):    250kbyte/sec average, 254kb/sec max.

Gotta say that this looked good in 2004, but this seems to be quite miserable performance for 2007 -- even more so since I acquired a 20Mbit/sec download rate with a new ADSL account a couple of months ago ... .

Cliff

Thanks for your answer and for testing this out. I wanted to ensure this was "normal".


I have to agree here. I run a couple of sites that don't receive much traffic (200 visits/day max), and I switched to Linode from my DSL connection because the latter had 1Mb upload. I'm a little bit disappointed to see that I haven't gained much there. And it seems that my Linode would have a hard time handling traffic peaks.

Anyone who knows why the network performance is so slow?

My theory: these network performance measurements include the effects of Linode disk i/o contention - a known bottleneck.

Justification: host to host transfers (where the host Linux is doing the disk accesses rather than the Linode) are much faster (Cliff's figures for Fremont to Atlanta were ~660 to ~830 kB/s).

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/ Peter

From here in Nashville, I can easily achieve my cable modem's maximum download rate (~700kBytes/sec) downloading from all three datacenters. The speed is the same regardless if the file is hosted on a Linode or on the Host itself. I can also get host to host transfers of over 1megabyte/sec (using wget). We have some clients pushing 10 times that during peaks.

Remember, your internet traffic goes through a lot more networks than just your cable modem and Linode's.

The limiter would only have an effect if it was limiting, or if the host was busy. Easy to look at /proc/io_status and see the former, and we've had little problems of late with people swap thrashing, so I wouldn't lay a blanket claim that Linode transfers are slower because of the limiter.

Our last 30 hosts that have gone online are all hardware raid, and I've yet to see anyone complain of someone swapthrashing on those hosts, even when there were swap thrashers.

I'll set up some test files for download at various locations...

-Chris

I'd definitely be interested in seeing some speed test results as a UK user

Also - tracerouting the hosts in Atlanta (host77.linode.com and up) frequently shows a noticeable ping increase between the final two hops, for example:

 5  gnax.ge2-3.br01.atl01.pccwbtn.net (63.216.31.158)  96.269 ms  96.222 ms  96.266 ms
 6  atl-core-e-gi4-4.gnax.net (209.51.131.30)  96.033 ms  96.180 ms  96.038 ms
 7  atl-core-a-tgi2-1.gnax.net (209.51.149.105)  96.328 ms  96.717 ms  96.522 ms
 8  l3-atl-18.gnax.net (209.51.131.74)  99.183 ms  99.251 ms  99.276 ms
 9  63.247.71.196 (63.247.71.196)  131.531 ms  143.354 ms  142.344 ms

In this case the host is responding ~40ms slower than the hop before it, but it varies between 0ms and 100ms. Has anyone experienced this with their Atlanta Linodes?

FWIW between my linode (on host21) and Panix Internet I transferred a 2.5Mb file via FTP. I got 340Kbytes/s transfer speed sending to panix; 320kbytes/s getting it back again. I then did it from my cable modem to Panix and got Kbytes/s downloading from Panix to home.

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)