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Comment by isalmon | Hacker News Reader

One of the reason why I had to switch to Digital Ocean is exactly this. I need my DB to be extremely fast, I ran some tests and, unsurprisingly, their SSD's were sometimes 10-20x faster. If Linode had an expensive SSD plan, I would totally use it for my DB and keep the same HDD linodes for the rest.

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How big is your database? Why are you not keeping it in memory? Was this an actual, real bottleneck? How many servers do you currently rent?

Preach!

SSDs are cheaper than RAM. I'm not keeping a 1TB database in memory.

How about SAP HANA? They keep 100TB in memory...

They have startup program: http://www.saphana.com/community/learn/startups

I've used SAP HANA and it's a fantastic piece of software arguably the best SQL database on the market today.

It also costs an absolute fortune (only approved hardware allowed) and even the AWS instance which costs $3.50/hour is not certified for production deployments. I don't know many startups who can afford $5000 a month for minimum redundancy.

That's not an option for me, my database is more than 20G.

32GB of RAM is $220 on Newegg.

Or, http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/

DB in RAM still requires to write to disk, which is often the bottleneck, not the reads.

That's my conundrum.

To get what I want from my database, I want SSDs. If I move my database to another provider, then I have to move everything else to keep the latency to the database low.

Not having an SSD option even when it's expensive leaves me shopping around for where to move all of my Linodes.

That's suprising, when I benchmarked I/O on several DigitalOcean VPS I was getting mechanical disk performance. Which plan are you running? 10-20x faster is kind of high, are you sure you weren't hitting a cache? I usually see around a 5x speed increase on a good host with sSD.

My database is on their $20/month plan. I'm not sure, maybe I was just unlucky with Linode. Just to give you an example - I have an SQL query that was taking ~90 seconds on Linode and when I moved it became 5 seconds. Again, YMMV.

I had some benchmarks show odd results and others were the expected increase.

You might try building a new server on Digital Ocean with VirtIO enabled. It's an experimental option for new servers and you can contact support to have it enabled on existing ones, but should show further improvements according to some other folks in the support community.

Linode's 8GB($319) plan to Digital Ocean's 4GB($40) plan and we were seeing a 10-12% increase in performance for large queries.

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