Reviews

Feb 18, 2012

QuickWeb Supa V8 VM2 (SSD) Review – Very Fast!

Last week we wrote about the QuickWeb Supa VZ1 VPS, which sported some amazing results for the price. However, like we mentioned before in the review, we wanted to give you the feeling of how fast their SSD VPSes are. I will tell you right from the start, these VPSes are some of the fastest I have ever used. They're really fast... and I mean it!

As we already introduced QuickWeb in our former review, let's just get straight on to the review.

Details

The QuickWeb Supa V8 VM2 VPS is quite the bargain for how much you get. For $15 a month, it will give you 512MBs of RAM with 768 swap, two CPU cores, 8GBs of SSD storage, 500GBs of bandwidth, and a 100Mbit port speed (which is actually less than than the Supa VZ1 I have). Of course, granted the price of SSDs nowadays (okay, they are not as much as they were a year ago, but they are still a good chunk of change), you do see some limitations compared to the hard disk based VPSes, like a lower port speed and less storage.

Although I would say for $15 a month, you are getting a great VPS for the money.

Network Speed

As the SSD can download data very fast to storage, I decided to download to the disk than to sending it off to /dev/null. The results are quite amazing.

wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test

--2012-02-12 05:37:23--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test

Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175

Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]

Saving to: `100mb.test'

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 83.2M/s   in 1.2s

2012-02-12 05:37:24 (83.2 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]

83mb/s is incredible for a VPS! And as there is indeed less storage on a SSD, I am sure these nodes will be a little bit faster overall as QuickWeb cannot fit as many users as they can with the space hard disks offer.

SSD Speed

If you are looking to buy an SSD VPS, you are most likely doing it for the speed. This QuickWeb SSD VPS troops quite a bit!

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

16384+0 records in

16384+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 5.78825 s, 186 MB/s

root@ssdtest:/downloads/ioping-0.6# ./ioping -c 10 /
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=1 time=0.4 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=2 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=3 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=4 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=5 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=6 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=7 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=8 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=9 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (simfs /dev/simfs): request=10 time=0.2 ms

--- / (simfs /dev/simfs) ioping statistics ---
10 requests completed in 9009.6 ms, 4281 iops, 16.7 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.2/0.2/0.4/0.0 ms

One might say that 186mb/s a second isn't that much for an SSD compared to RAID, but if you think about it, this is one drive, not four or five drives combined together (RAID)! Not only are the dd results impressive, but the I/O ping is amazing at a nice 16.7mb/s a second (the VZ1 VPS got a low 0.4 mb/s). That's like 40x faster compared to the RAID config! Hot damn that's good! :P

CPU Performance

We know what you're thinking! How's the performance on this baby? As there is one more CPU core on this VPS than the VZ1, I'm thinking it'll do better. Let's see!

System Information

  Operating System      Linux 2.6.32-274.7.1.el5.028stab095.1 i686

  Model                 N/A

  Motherboard           N/A

  Processor                       Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31270 @ 3.40GHz @ 3.39 GHz

                        1 Processor, 2 Cores, 2 Threads

  Processor ID          GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 42 Stepping 7

  L1 Instruction Cache  32.0 KB

  L1 Data Cache         32.0 KB

  L2 Cache              256 KB

  L3 Cache              8.00 MB

  Memory                15.6 GB

  BIOS                  N/A

Integer

  Blowfish

    single-threaded scalar   2192 ||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    4699 ||||||||||||||||||

  Text Compress

    single-threaded scalar   3001 ||||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    5844 |||||||||||||||||||||||

  Text Decompress

    single-threaded scalar   3256 |||||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    6689 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Image Compress

    single-threaded scalar   2464 |||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    4827 |||||||||||||||||||

  Image Decompress

    single-threaded scalar   2439 |||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    4987 |||||||||||||||||||

Lua

    single-threaded scalar   4269 |||||||||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    8506 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Floating Point

  Mandelbrot

    single-threaded scalar   2837 |||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    5769 |||||||||||||||||||||||

  Dot Product

    single-threaded scalar   4670 ||||||||||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    9902 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

    single-threaded vector   5565 ||||||||||||||||||||||

    multi-threaded vector   12820 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  LU Decomposition

    single-threaded scalar   3021 ||||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    6120 ||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Primality Test

    single-threaded scalar   4885 |||||||||||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar    7831 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Sharpen Image

    single-threaded scalar  11411 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar   22952 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Blur Image

    single-threaded scalar   8862 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

    multi-threaded scalar   17800 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Memory

  Read Sequential

    single-threaded scalar   7839 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Write Sequential

    single-threaded scalar  12333 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Stdlib Allocate

    single-threaded scalar   5595 ||||||||||||||||||||||

  Stdlib Write

    single-threaded scalar   8842 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Stdlib Copy

    single-threaded scalar  17438 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Stream

  Stream Copy

    single-threaded scalar   7279 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

    single-threaded vector   8554 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Stream Scale

    single-threaded scalar   7696 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

    single-threaded vector   8242 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Stream Add

    single-threaded scalar   8067 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

    single-threaded vector   9028 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Stream Triad

    single-threaded scalar   8792 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

    single-threaded vector   6686 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Benchmark Summary

  Integer Score              4431 |||||||||||||||||

  Floating Point Score       8888 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Memory Score              10409 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Stream Score               8043 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Geekbench Score            7547 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

As you can clearly see, the score is about 1.4x faster than with one core. Logically, you would of expected 2x faster, but technology isn't that persistent. Never alas, it's for sure something to not complain about; that's a very fast VPS right there! We have to test the UnixBench scores though to see how it can stand up with consistent load. This should be where the differences are.

TEST                                        BASELINE     RESULT      INDEX

Dhrystone 2 using register variables        376783.7 18826207.6      499.7
Double-Precision Whetstone                      83.1     1952.5      235.0
Execl Throughput                               188.3    12461.4      661.8
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks         2672.0   338868.0     1268.2
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks           1077.0    96341.0      894.5
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks        15382.0  2533936.0     1647.3
Pipe Throughput                             111814.6  2404133.8      215.0
Pipe-based Context Switching                 15448.6   774252.4      501.2
Process Creation                               569.3    36065.4      633.5
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                    44.8     1986.0      443.3
System Call Overhead                        114433.5  1811852.9      158.3
                                                                 =========
     FINAL SCORE                                                     516.4

With the UnixBench being 1.8x faster than the VZ1 VPS, I'd say the extra processor sped up the VPS by nearly two times, which realistically should happen. The performance for a two core VPS at only $15 a month is not bad at all!

Overall

I am very impressed with QuickWeb's v8 VM2 VPS; it well exceeded my expectations on a high-performance VPS. If you are looking for a VPS that will handle database heavy applications with consistent load times, QuickWeb's v8 VM2 VPS is for you! Hard drives might handle sequential reads very nicely, but these SSDs can handle random I/O way better than anything else can!

Overall, I give this VPS an A+ on everything. Despite the slower port speed, it is ironically faster than the one gigabit line as well; I guess that's an SSD for you!