SSD - Does it make sense for IPB hosting?

[jair101]

I will be moving next month to a VPS hosting, not only that I am starting to outgrow my current shared plan, but also for extra capabilities and hopefully faster page loads.

The host is offering both SSD and HDD packages at the same price. The SSD is 10gb, the HDD is 50. RIght now my site is smallish and I can fit in to the 10GB and have some space to grow, but eventually in 6 months I expect that 10gb might not be enough, probably even sooner.

My question is, does SSD make sense when hosting IPB? I see there are opinions that for some purposes there will be no difference between SSD and HDD and for some others it is very advantageous to have SSD. Don't know which is more appropriate for IPB.

[IveLeft...]

SSD's can be faster but it would depend on the configuration of the drives on the VPS. Are the SSD's high end enterprise ones or desktop ?devices.

We run RAID10 with hot standby SAS Hard Disks 15.7k and these are very fast and if the server has a decent perc raid card then you can have an SSD drive as a cache for the SAS drives.

If you do run with SSD's then make sure you have a decent backup program for your VPS.

It would also depend on how busy your forum is as to if you will even see the difference.

[jair101]

The host says they are latest samsung model, whatever that means.

1000 uniques, 7k impressions, about 30-40 people online on average. I guess it is not really busy, maybe there won't be any huge difference...

[Makoto]

10GB of space is pretty limited.

I run my servers on a software RAID 1 configuration with 2x128GB enterprise grade solid state drives for the operating system and MySQL server. But I don't store my entire site on the SSD, only the core IPB data files. For attachments, IDM files, backups, general log files and so on, I store all of those on a 3x1TB (4x2TB on my second server) hardware RAID 5 configuration.

Solid state drives can offer significant performance benefits in some areas. MySQL/database performance, for example. But at the same time, for a smallish forum, it probably won't matter much to you. There are many (better) other things you can do to optimize your server for performance. I would probably prioritize memory/RAM over a SSD in your situation. With adequate memory available, you can move your forum over to a MariaDB + XtraDB configuration and have your entire forums database kept in the InnoDB buffer pool for optimal database performance, and memory not being used by other processes can still be used for disk caching.

[Nevo]

Solid State Drives read and write a hundred times quicker. They make the biggest difference when used on the Operating System Partition. Ever since I made the switch to SSD, I've never regretted it although it is expensive, It shows amazing results and is able to provide better results with boards that have huge databases and require extensive database usage.

I'm going to disagree with Deactivated about the RAM because if your host is providing you with an SSD, they already know about providing you with enough RAM. In comparison to 100 x read and write, I really can't see how RAM can provide better performance. When your server is configured or has the activity to actually need the RAM, it will be used... however a SSD is always reading and writing which shows its performance.

Do you really need a SSD Drive for your IPB? The answer is no, because my server has regular HD's hosting files and I haven't seen that big of a difference to have SSD for that storage. The difference is only when your IPB has a huge database behind it and it's hosted there as-well.

[Dmacleo]

just moved off a vps with ssd to a dedicated with non-ssd.

don't see any differences but thats due to the vps ssd was a vps with other users. if I was only user I would have seen a huge difference.

vps with ssd is better than vps w/o ssd, I did notice a gain when they migrated to ssd. no hard figures/data, just personal observations.

[Makoto]

Solid State Drives read and write a hundred times quicker. They make the biggest difference when used on the Operating System Partition.

In my experience the average spinning 7200RPM HDD can write/read at speeds up to 125MB/s. No solid state drive I know of writes at speeds in excess of 12,500MB/s. SSD's are in general up to ~3-5x faster than a standard hard drive as far as raw read/write speeds go. Nowhere remotely near 100x quicker.

Even though the raw read/write speeds of SSD's can be impressive, that's not what really makes them shine. SSD's are amazing because of their extremely low latency and access times. This is why when you upgrade to a SSD in your desktop/laptop, you notice everything feels like it opens instantly. It's not because of the SSD's raw read/write speeds, the standard HDD is plenty fast in this regard, but because of how blazingly quick it can find and access the data you're requesting. It's flash memory competing against trying to seek and find data that's spinning on a metal plate.

I'm going to disagree with Deactivated about the RAM because if your host is providing you with an SSD, they already know about providing you with enough RAM.

Not really, no. The two don't really have anything to do with each other. A hosting company isn't going to start offering all their clients more free memory because they start offering SSD's as an option to their clients.

In comparison to 100 x read and write, I really can't see how RAM can provide better performance.

To start, as stated above, SSD's do not offer anywhere near 100x the read/write speeds of a standard spinning disk. I offered a few good reasons as to why memory is important above. I'm not going to elaborate on them in this post, I don't have the time right now.

[Nevo]

In my experience the average spinning 7200RPM HDD can write/read at speeds up to 125MB/s. No solid state drive I know of writes at speeds in excess of 12,500MB/s. SSD's are in general up to ~3-5x faster than a standard hard drive as far as raw read/write speeds go. Nowhere remotely near 100x quicker.

Even though the raw read/write speeds of SSD's can be impressive, that's not what really makes them shine. SSD's are amazing because of their extremely low latency and access times. This is why when you upgrade to a SSD in your desktop/laptop, you notice everything feels like it opens instantly. It's not because of the SSD's raw read/write speeds, the standard HDD is plenty fast in this regard, but because of how blazingly quick it can find and access the data you're requesting. It's flash memory competing against trying to seek and find data that's spinning on a metal plate.

Not really, no. The two don't really have anything to do with each other. A hosting company isn't going to start offering all their clients more free memory because they start offering SSD's as an option to their clients.

To start, as stated above, SSD's do not offer anywhere near 100x the read/write speeds of a standard spinning disk. I offered a few good reasons as to why memory is important above. I'm not going to elaborate on them in this post, I don't have the time right now.

The real difference is when you have a SSD setup for the Operating System which performs much faster overall. I highly suggest you look at the high end SSD drives which do offer the write and read I'm talking about and see how it works within a server operating system + databases. I've been using the average drives your so fond of and the SSD shows better performance from my experience.

[Makoto]

I'm trying to be polite. but you're pressing your luck. It's one thing to make mistakes when you're just trying to be helpful, it's another trying to argue you're right when you flat out don't understand what you're talking about.

I highly suggest you look at the high end SSD drives which do offer the write and read I'm talking about

No sir, you most certainly are not using any enterprise grade solid state drives that read/write at speeds of 12,500MB/s+, because even if such technology did exist, I highly doubt you could afford it.

You also most definitely have no need for such power. A solid state drive that powerful in the hands of you or I would be a complete waste of the technology.

Perhaps you missed my entire post above, but I run multiple servers that run with enterprise grade SSD's in them.

The real difference is when you have a SSD setup for the Operating System which performs much faster overall.

No one cares if your server running off a SSD can boot up faster than another running off a spinning disk. In the real world, that doesn't matter. SSD's can be amazing for desktop use. For servers, they can also be great tools, but they have to be used right.

I've been using the average drives your so fond of and the SSD shows better performance from my experience.

That's probably in part because you don't know how to properly configure your server. I suggest you research more into XtraDB, InnoDB buffer pools, log flushing and things of the sort if you're really interested in tuning your database server for optimal performance. These are all things I've poured many hours of study and research into.

I do use SSD's on my server configurations and I love them, but the OP should not sacrifice 40GB of storage for one. He needs room to scale more than anything. 10GB of space is probably not going to last him that long.

jair101, if you ever do want any help tuning your server after getting everything set up, please feel free to message me also. I generally have some hours to spare during the day, so I don't mind helping people here out when I can to kill time.

[jair101]

Thanks for the offer, I will probably msg you when I start moving things around, it should be around christmas as I am waiting on a discount from the host I have chosen. I think I made up my mind that I will stick to HDD for now.

[Nevo]

The bottomline is that you don't need a SSD for your IPB hosting because it will not make a difference to your website. If your web host provider is using a SSD for the OS, you are going to see a difference. As far as the 10GB limit, I've done an average check and unless you plan on hosting files or have a huge database that is 1-2GB, you'll be able to pull off 10GB including backup. Although I never recommend going with a small limit like that since every host is different in terms of what happens when you hit that limit.

Respectfully theres no need to comment on Deactivateds opinion and I see no point explaining anything to him based on his post since he is knowledgeable about everything.

[Aiwa]

I run 3 communities, not including test / dev installs (6 test / dev installs, 4 for MP purposes) plus a WP site on a 30G SSD, 1G RAM, (4 core) 3.3Ghz VPS without issue.

The hit specs of all of the above is likely about the size of just your one. Including bots, I have an average user count of about 400 on one of the sites alone. I'm using a total of 5.6G of HDD space and averaging around 500M of memory usage.

I do, however, have a second VPS with 120G of cached SSD storage for a backup system using rsync / rsnapshot. I don't store any backups on the production machine, but rather have a sudo 'hot' backup on the second VPS that can be restored from a single command if needed.

If you store a lot of media files, 10G won't be enough, but you could get around that with external storage.

After moving from a shared host about 6 months ago, I have noticed page exec times to be about 10-25% faster, from 0.25 sec avg exec on my custom IP.Content page down to about 0.18 sec avg exec time.

Something to keep in mind with VPS's... You do still have to wait for HDD resources. HDD I/O is not dedicated for your node. While you would benefit from SSD's on a VPS, performance would likely be on par with spinning drives on a dedicated box. With VPS's or shared, I would recommend SSD's as you do share I/Ops.

[Makoto]

Something to keep in mind with VPS's... You do still have to wait for HDD resources. HDD I/O is not dedicated for your node.

This is true, and I almost did mention this fact in my post, but even then as long as you're using a good hosting provider it should be fine. I've only used a VPS hosting provider once for a short time a very long time ago.

The original poster did clearly state himself that he doesn't think 10GB of storage space would be enough for him in the future. I was giving him advice based on that fact.

The fact remains that he doesn't need a SSD though, and when you know what you're doing, there are countless other ways you can optimize your forum for performance to keep it fast regardless of if you use a spinning disk or not. Will using SSD's offer better overall performance? Yes. Does that mean your forum is going to be slow without one? No. Are there other things you can do to keep your forum fast without needing to sacrifice on storage you think you'll need in the future? Definitely.

I'm just trying to give realistic real-world advice.

Respectfully theres no need to comment on Deactivateds opinion and I see no point explaining anything to him based on his post since he is knowledgeable about everything.

I would love for you to explain to me how you think your SSD has raw read/write speeds of ~12,500MB/s+. :smile:

You could just admit you're wrong instead of trying to continue to give jail101 bad information.

[Dmacleo]

some OCZ have specs saying 12k IOPS Max, wonder if thats it.

[Grumpy]

Maybe people should stop arguing and actually explain things. :P

SSD read/write roughly few multiple speed at sequential compared to HD. Some are actually slower too and there is quite a bit of overlap when it comes to sequential writes. But, SSD's have much higher IOPS. Some are well above 1000x the IOPS of a HD. (Ex: WD Black 2TB has ~80 IOPS, my samsung SSD on my desktop has 90,000 IOPS [Actually tested this myself to reach 90k]). This increase in IO per second matters greatly in things that need quick and small access like database. This is why SSD will fare far superior in small random read / writes and can surpass 100x the speed of HD in a benchmark of such settings.

But, even though SSD is orders of magnitude superior to HD in usage like database, RAM is still orders of magnitude faster than your SSD. Even if your SSD was magically made out of same stuff as RAM, RAM will still be faster as it's quite literally closer in distance to CPU. So, methods through which you enhance speed via making usage of RAM will always be more beneficial. And with small boards, you can often put all you need in RAM.

I don't believe SSD scare of reliability is an issue anymore. Failure rate of SSD at ship or after time are showing to be no worse than HD in large quantitative analysis. Well, obviously varies a lot between brand (*cough* early stage ocz is the worst *cough*), make, enterprise model, etc. but in general, there's no need to say SSD has a reliability issue. I believe you can trust an SSD with data as much as your HD. Intel and latest Samsung model with over-provisioning is proving to show similar performance and reliability that of enterprise models at general consumer pricing point. That being said, you should still keep backups regardless of what medium you are using.

On a completely different point and having worked with many VPS dealers, I find that in general, SSD VPS providers have a better management of their resources in general. Most VPS craps out when HD is bottlenecked as it is the resource most hard to limit. Pulling numbers out of my feelings without any quantitative study, for a low to mid level priced VPS, I would expect 15/100 HD VPS to come into some sort of bottlenecking issue that slows/shuts you down greatly in the first month. With SSD VPS, however, I'd expect 5/100. Again, these are my feelings, but something to ponder when choosing between ssd node vps vs hd node vps.

[Makoto]

I don't believe SSD scare of reliability is an issue anymore. Failure rate of SSD at ship or after time are showing to be no worse than HD in large quantitative analysis. Well, obviously varies a lot between brand (*cough* early stage ocz is the worst *cough*), make, enterprise model, etc. but in general, there's no need to say SSD has a reliability issue. I believe you can trust an SSD with data as much as your HD. Intel and latest Samsung model with over-provisioning is proving to show similar performance and reliability that of enterprise models at general consumer pricing point. That being said, you should still keep backups regardless of what medium you are using.

I believe SSD's have overtaken HDD's in reliability, if you're basing those statistics on the average return rates.

[jair101]

Thank you for all the replies. Yeah, I believe for my case I am convinced to go with the HDD option. My community is travel based, gallery is very popular and a lot of image attachments too. So far for half a year it is about 4GB in total, so I assume with OS, projected growth and other stuff 10GB on the VPS will soon be not enough. And proper optimization will probably create much bigger gains then SSD initially anyway.

Lots of good info on SSD in general, I hope it will be useful for other people too.

[GreenLinks]

SSD's are way faster but you need to choose the SSD you are using wisely as they break way more often then hdd's. For any active board you should make sure to invest in enterprise level ssd's.

But only having SSD's is not enough. You need to learn storing actively used data in RAM as memory has the fastest result.

On our big boards we store innodb , sphinx data in Ram for faster response times. Only downside is you need to regenerate them after a server restart , but who needs a server restart these days ;)

[Makoto]

Only downside is you need to regenerate them after a server restart , but who needs a server restart these days ;)

I still restart every few months or so to keep up with Kernel upgrades/to apply security patches to the Kernel :p

(I know there are ways to avoid needing to restart after kernel upgrades, but I think most of those methods are sketchy and I've never considered it worth the hassle)

I do the same for all of my boards though, Sphinx and XtraDB/InnoDB both run entirely in RAM on my forum. Which is why I recommended ensuring adequate memory over anything in my first post.

jair101 is using a VPS though, so he's trusting his host entirely with the reliability of the hardware. But I would assume the SSD storage he'd be using would be running off a proper RAID configuration.

[Luis Manson]

Hello Aiwa, can you elaborate on this?:

have a sudo 'hot' backup on the second VPS that can be restored from a single command if needed.

[Aiwa]

I may have exaggerated a bit, rsnapshot / rsync can restore the file structure from the remote server. You would need to reimport all of the databases manually though, I believe

I've not had to do it yet.

[Makoto]

I could write up a bash script for generating backups and pushing them with rsync.

You could automate the re-import process, but that would require storing a plaintext password in the script. I have a seperate user I use with only SELECT and LOCK privileges for generating MySQL backups bi-daily.

This is the script I run on cron for generating MySQL backups automatically anyways,

#!/bin/bash
###############################
# MySQL Backup Script         #
###############################
backupPath='/media/storage/backups'
date="$(date +%b_%d_%H)"
 
# Generate SQL dumps #
dbUser='foo_backup'
dbPass='foo_pass'
dbName='foo_forum'
 
mysqldump -u $dbUser --password=$dbPass $dbName > "$backupPath"/sql/"$date".sql
 
if [ -w "$backupPath"/sql/"$date".sql ]
then
        gzip -c9 "$backupPath"/sql/"$date".sql > "$backupPath"/sql/"$date".sql.gz
        rm "$backupPath"/sql/"$date".sql
else
        echo "ERROR: Generating SQLDump failed"
        echo "File does not exist or is somehow not writeable"
        exit 126;
fi

I used to have something much more complex for pushing site backups with rsync and the sorts, but I don't use or have it anymore. I just make rsync backups manually.

But you could easily have a script like this push backups to remote server using an unprivileged user. For MySQL backups a simple SCP command would suffice. Properly rsyncing your entire forum is a little more complicated.

[Aiwa]

rsnapshot uses rsync and runs on a schedule to keep incremental backups on the remote server.

I have a bash script gzip the most recent daily backup once a week and email me so I can download it for a local backup.

Remote server doesn't have FTP, all done via SCP / SSH.

[Dmacleo]

was planning on looking into that this week, presently I am just using the directadmin admin backup process to backup all user info and databases to remote vps (accessed through ajaxplorer gui for front end access) but I don't think it will do incremental that way.

[IveLeft...]

And if you pay for the license there is R1Soft - We use both r1soft and cpanel ftp backups