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Comment by jcoby | Hacker News Reader

A few things really stand out for me:

1) I am shocked how slow EC2 is and how expensive. A m1.large is $0.240/hr or ~$175/month. And it's 7-10x slower than a $350/mo dedicated box. You would be spending $1500/mo to equal one dedicated box (not including bandwidth and S3 fees). A reserved instance is cheaper of course.

2) The multiple queries test would seem to be the best one to really simulate real-world usage. JSON-serialization is mostly testing the language.

This test pretty much puts most of the interpreted languages on a full stack framework together at the bottom. Although django seems to come out at the bottom of the pack for some reason.

Then come the "raw" tests and JIT languages running full stack frameworks. And at the top are the compiled languages. Not really surprising there.

3) I'm surprised php-raw did so well. And that go did so poorly.

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The main selling point for EC2 isn't that it's cheap, it's that it's easy and fast to scale up/down and that you get managed failover. For that ease you pay a hefty premium. A lot of companies that have highly variable demand will often go with EC2 because if they get a sudden spike in demand they can quickly spin up 3 or 4 new instances to load balance across, and then when the demand dies off they can spin them all back down to save money. Doing something similar with dedicated hardware doesn't really work, you either end up without enough hardware to meet demand, or else you've got a bunch of hardware sitting around idle most of the time.

The key is that you don't need to plan for anything.

Financially and performance wise you're probably better off on dedicated hardware with some over-provisioning but first you need to know how many machines you're going to need.

It's more accurate to compare dedicated boxes to reserved instances.

Reserved instances are simply a pricing construct. You're paying upfront for up to 24/7 usage, but you're running on the same pool as the standard instance. Dedicated instances, on the other hand, do what you're talking about but they're much pricier:

http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/

The comment you replied to didn't talk about what they do. I took it to mean it's more accurate from a price perspective.

A little too generalized, LuaJIT is winning some of the benchmarks

Go seems to have issues with the database drivers, maybe because of the 1.1 update? It was quite fast in the previous iterations of the test which used Go 1.0 afaik.

In the previous round, we did not have Go implementations of the database test, so this is new community-contributed database test code here. However, see my post elsewhere in this thread [1] about the community's work to resolve the issues afflicting that test.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5590132

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