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solid state drives

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    #16
    Re: solid state drives

    Resurrecting and tagging on to an existing thread here:

    I'm considering moving a web app from a server with a standard hard drive, to another server with a solid state RAID. Anyone have experience doing this, or have thoughts? My #1 question is whether you saw an increased responsiveness of the web site, and now noticeable or measurable it was. This is all about the end-user experience.
    -Steve
    sigpic

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      #17
      Re: solid state drives

      For what it is worth I have an in-house vmware system -not with raid- but I did the exercise comparing performance between SSD & WD Raptor disk & I found NO difference at all. I doubt if SSD will increase A5 peformance. Memory & CPU speed for the WAS seem to be more important (watch the CPU spike with every component being rendered for example). I'd be curious to learn from your experiment!
      Frank

      Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand

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        #18
        Re: solid state drives

        So far that has been my experience too, which is surprising to me, given how much faster the disc access speeds are on SSD.
        Gary S. Traub, Ph.D.

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          #19
          Re: solid state drives

          Indeed, on my development machine however SSD is fantastic but there I have many I/O requests whereas the server needs CPU & RAM
          Frank

          Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand

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            #20
            Re: solid state drives

            Steve,

            SSD's will not improve effective speed because the WAS is internet bound speeds. This does depend a bit or a lot on how you are hitting the tables though. If you are limited number of active users, or are accessing only small sections of the tables, the amount of I/O to the disk is small, and hence the use for an SSD speed is limited. However if your SQL queries are accessing a lot of records of a lot of tables, you will find the speed of the SSD will be helpful. Most of Alpha's code is probably in memory, so the only major disk accessing for programs will probably be Windows API's accessed by Alpha. If you have a good amount of memory on your server (8gb or more), I believe you will see very little disk I/O for the Windows API as well. Of course this is all based upon only Alpha being run along with support utilities (like watchdog timers, etc), and not running other major programs.

            If you really want to have the fastest speeds for disks, I would normally separate the data drive from the Windows/Alpha EXE drive, but if using a SSD, this is not the case, and can be 1 drive without much speed loss.

            Also, see my Alpha Five Hardware Suggestions tips
            Regards,

            Ira J. Perlow
            Computer Systems Design


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              #21
              Re: solid state drives

              Steve,

              One other thing that comes to mind is that you can outsource the handling of images, static PDF's etc to another server; that gives you 2 benefits:
              Your server only handles the pure A5 stuff not images, static PDF's etc
              If someone decides to use your images by hot linking to them your server is not at risk for being charged by someone else
              You could use a cheap shared web server for that maybe even the free webspace you get from your provider.
              All bits help...
              Frank

              Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand

              Comment


                #22
                Re: solid state drives

                Here is a thought.. there is a web site
                http://www.storagesearch.com/
                that has been researching SSD storage now for many many years.
                You can get many of your questions answered and ssd myths busted here.
                After reading much of the research they have done there it seems to me that SSD drives and their write issues are a thing of the past.
                Also SSD drives for the enterprise are a big thing now and the performance just blows just about everything else away.
                Also you folks can speak to Clive at Zebra host.
                He has lots of experience hosting Alpha sites on raid 10 SSD drives.
                There are a few other threads hear on the Alpha forum that also talks about other developers hosting on Zebra host using their SSD drives and the actual increase in performance that has occurred.
                Hope this helps.
                Calyxte

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                  #23
                  Re: solid state drives

                  Some of us like to use cloud platform servers rather than traditonal VPS or dedicated servers. The major difference between these is that in cloud virtual servers will restart on a different node in the event of failure on a hardware node, minimizing downtime. Also in the cloud user has ful conrol over running servers from one control panel.

                  Anyway if you want take advantage of the similar speed than ssd disks offers and you want to use real cloud servers leaseweb.com has premium cloud servers. They use extremly fast fibre channel, raid 6 disks. Unfortunately these super fast servers are at the moment just for european users.

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                    #24
                    Re: solid state drives

                    I can tell without a doubt that SSD servers are extremely fast to the point that comments from users say that my site is like working in a desktop environment.
                    I recently changed over from what I thought was a good dedicated server.
                    My site is responding on average 4-10 times faster on all aspects of the app.
                    To be honest I don't even need the report server.

                    Not a chance I would ever use anything else now.
                    Chad Brown

                    Comment


                      #25
                      Re: solid state drives

                      Chad,
                      That is impressive but of course I don't know how your site performed previously. Is this with Zebrahost ?
                      Frank

                      Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand

                      Comment


                        #26
                        Re: solid state drives

                        Both machines are with Zebrahost. The original was an 8 core 6gb ram with raid 10 drives. It worked well and most people never compained, but once you have used the new one you would never want to go back.
                        Chad Brown

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