Hacker News Reader

Comment by steckerbrett | Hacker News Reader

I thought ARM servers might be nice on scaleway but was quite disappointed in the performance. 32bit and all disk IO over a network connection is really not a good start. Maybe that will improve when we see more ARM64 around.

View on HN

At .004 euro cents an hour, seriously, what were you expecting? 32 bits seems like they threw in 16 bits for free.

It's approximately the same price as Digital Oceans lowest offering, which has significantly higher performance in every area.

I'm not sure they are comparable. I have a bunch of servers with both Scacleway and DO and, despite the slow disk access on Scacleway's, you get 2GB of memory per server which works well for some microservices.

A DO instance with the same amount of memory costs $20, compared to €2 for an IP-less server on Scacleway.

Are you (and parent) looking at something other than their pricing pages? It seems to me that scaleway costs 0.6 euro cents/hour, but also generally has higher numbers for most features than Digital Ocean: more cores, more RAM, more disk, more bandwidth.

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/

My comparison was between the C1 offering from Scaleway and the lowest DigitalOcean package. Scaleway has far larger disk and memory, but the disk is remote over the network link and the 4 ARM cores are 32bit and terribly slow. I really like Scaleways configuration and control panel but the performance just isn't there. It's likely better for a lot of things other people are doing but I needed the IO and CPu performance.

How did you measure CPU performance? With DO you have propably a high "burst" cpu performance but if you keep using a lot of CPU ressources they will probably supsense your VM because of "abuse" or something (my experience with other VM providers). On Scaleway you have worse CPU performance but you can use the full CPU 24/7.

I tested scaleway C1 for compiling with GCC and doing some basic lores video converting with ffmpeg and they are terribly slow for this kind of tasks.

Just general feeling compiling some packages and messing with 'openssl speed'.

Compiling software is a somewhat meaningful metric across architectures (with caveats), but openssl speed is not really indicative of the CPU performance, rather it's benchmarking its own fast assembly routines. That only matters if your workload is crypto-bound.

You could also be benchmarking the interface between openssl and crypto hardware, several ARM SoCs have crypto accelerators.

Two words, though: unmetered bandwidth.

Digital Ocean claims to meter bandwidth but they don't.

This is true but betting a business it will remain this way is foolish.

They have stated in multiple pages that they plan to meter bandwidth.

I assume you mean 0.004 euros, 0.004 euro cents * 24 * 30 would be 2.88 euro cents per month.

Even less than that, as price is monthly capped: https://scaleway.com/faq/billing/#-How-do-I-take-advantage-o...

I think that tethering the storage to the compute nodes would work better.. 16-32GB on the same board with the arm chip, in clusters per nU, per rack ... Reducing the bottlenecks from data storage to the processor. In this kind of scenario widely distributed databases could be a much better fit in ARM than in x86 based servers.

Imagine how fast Cassandra or something similar could run if your filtering nodes ran with the data, and much more widely distributed than typical... it could literally be a night and day difference in the amount of data that can be processed in a rack.

That is Scacleway's implementation, not so much a limitation of ARM. Have a look at Applied Micro based servers for something more "server" like..

I tried to run a Tomcat server on Scaleway, but it simply didn't work, and it was nothing complex, just jspwiki. Too bad, the price was really good.

What was your issue?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com