More Hardware Upgrades

Hopefully you’ve noticed some drastic improvements in load times, as I’ve moved the website to new hardware. My old “server” was a little Mini-ITX box with a 1Ghz VIA Nehemiah CPU, 256MB of memory, and a laptop hard drive. It certainly was quiet and power efficient, but it was frustratingly slow sometimes. The new server is actually my old desktop with an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, 512MB of memory, and two brand new 750GB WD Caviars running in a RAID 1 array (yes, these drives are dead silent like the reviews say). I decided to go with Linux software raid after reading some interesting opinions on Linux Software RAID vs Hardware RAID. I also found some surprising benchmarks showing that Linux software RAID is actually faster than a lot of consumer-level SATA RAID cards.

Compared to the old hardware…

                      root@old-server:~# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda
                      
                      /dev/hda:
                       Timing cached reads:   278 MB in  2.01 seconds = 138.26 MB/sec
                       Timing buffered disk reads:   88 MB in  3.00 seconds =  29.32 MB/sec
                      

the new hardware shows huge improvements in disk transfer rates, pretty much in line with what I expected.

                      root@new-server:~# hdparm -tT /dev/md0
                      
                      /dev/md0:
                       Timing cached reads:   950 MB in  2.00 seconds = 474.49 MB/sec
                       Timing buffered disk reads:  222 MB in  3.01 seconds =  73.81 MB/sec
                      

With twice as much memory as before, I’m also not swapping nearly as much (or really at all for that matter). But what I didn’t expect was for Linux software RAID and LVM2 to have such a big impact on my load average. It actually seems to be around 10-20% higher on average, even with a much faster CPU. Interesting…