Sunday, February 03 2008 23:01hosting solutions

I just heard about some cool company released cheap xen based hostings. I thought I would give them a try to see if they could be a good solution for zena hosting. As the prices are low, I decided to take a 768 Mb install.

I took some time to put everything in place on the server (taking notes to write a script), making sure everything is ok.

Benchmarks

I found the application to be quite slow so I ran all the tests to see if I it was real or just a strange feeling:

tests on zenadmin.org’s xen

test 1	96s
test 2	77s

tests on the other company

test 1	369s
test 2	166s

tests on my old G4 laptop

test	152s

estimated minimal requirements

test	300s

The first company has Intel Xeon 5130 Woodcrest processors, the other one uses AMD dual-core (Athlon?). I do not know precisely what the CPU sharing policy is for these two companies because a xen can have either “guaranteed” CPU time or “shared”. The first means that you get a fixed % of processing power, whatever the other users are doing, the second means that you can get very high or very low processing power depending on the global charge on the server.

Conclusion

As with any Ruby on Rails based application, you need a strong server setup when running zena if you want your logged in visitors to be happy. For anonymous users, zena has a very good caching system which means processing power does not make any big difference, except when page rendering is needed because some new content was added/updated. But if you intend to use zena as an administrative tool in which most of your users are logged in, you should be careful not to take a too small setup if you want to have a nice user experience.

minimal requirements

• RAM 256
• cpu single core @ 600 Mhz
• system system 2Go for debian system with zena
• data disk 1 Go per site
• database 5 Mo per site