LowEndBoxTV: Can Your Linux Distro Choice Speed Up Your VPS?

raindog308

The answer is yes - but of course, it's all in the details and Piotr gets into them!

TimboJones

Damn. I was really hoping someone would benchmark Clear Linux OS from Intel. It's gain is from better compiler optimization than popular distros. You can see on Phoronix that it wins most benchmarks most consistently.

raindog308

@TimboJones said: Damn. I was really hoping someone would benchmark Clear Linux OS from Intel. It's gain is from better compiler optimization than popular distros. You can see on Phoronix that it wins most benchmarks most consistently.

@AXYZE

stoned

Why no Alpine with MUSL? I want to see how that compares to GLIBC distros.

raza19

For years I've been using Debian on my servers to deliver web content. Never considered that the OS might have such a big impact. But I wonder if a finely tuned php setup with nginx on Debian will be at par with a similar setup on Ubuntu 22.04. Nevertheless, this has definitely convinced me to jump ship and try next deployments on Ubuntu. Thank u @piotr for ur hard work.

AXYZE

@TimboJones said:
Damn. I was really hoping someone would benchmark Clear Linux OS from Intel. It's gain is from better compiler optimization than popular distros. You can see on Phoronix that it wins most benchmarks most consistently.

I wanted to benchmark Clear Linux OS but I had major issues trying to install it on VPS.
I had idea to try install it via QEMU on rescue system (thats how I installed Debian on ZFS on my dedi), but then I realized - who will do it for cheap VPS? No provider offers it as template and its rolling release, so its not really made for front-facing server. So I scrapped this idea and used just popular distros.

I will however test this OS in near future on bare metal - Hetzner AX41, because I can mount ISOs there, something I can't do on Hetzner Cloud.

jbiloh

@AXYZE said:

@TimboJones said:
Damn. I was really hoping someone would benchmark Clear Linux OS from Intel. It's gain is from better compiler optimization than popular distros. You can see on Phoronix that it wins most benchmarks most consistently.

I wanted to benchmark Clear Linux OS but I had major issues trying to install it on VPS.
I had idea to try install it via QEMU on rescue system (thats how I installed Debian on ZFS on my dedi), but then I realized - who will do it for cheap VPS? No provider offers it as template and its rolling release, so its not really made for front-facing server. So I scrapped this idea and used just popular distros.

I will however test this OS in near future on bare metal - Hetzner AX41, because I can mount ISOs there, something I can't do on Hetzner Cloud.

I really enjoyed this video, @AXYZE

Poor, poor CentOS. Oh the memories...

AXYZE

@stoned said:
Why no Alpine with MUSL? I want to see how that compares to GLIBC distros.

First I wanted to include more distros (including Alpine Linux, OpenSUSE, Clear Linux) and FreeBSD, but like I wrote in my response to @TimboJones - after thinking about it I decided to benchmark distros that are available with every provider.

I will do followup on dedi Hetzner AX41, where I can mount ISOs and I will tests all of these OSes!

This video is kinda intro to my big web server stack comparison that I'm doing right now. DirectAdmin, CPanel, free panels, own compilation of nginx etc.

Like I wrote in my earlier thread
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/184323/whats-the-fastest-stack-for-wordpress-woocommerce-php#latest
"Using centminmod from April 2020. Rock solid, but I'm not sure if its still the fastest - CentOS7 "
I was curious how much there is difference between ancient CentOS7 and new OSes. Now I know - difference is completly mind blowing. Now I can provide a lot more insight in my web server comparision video and also we know that we can massively improve performance of every panel - CPanel, DirectAdmin etc. if we change distro or update it (like in case with Ubuntu 20.04 vs 22.04). No need to spend extra cash!

AXYZE

@raza19 said:
For years I've been using Debian on my servers to deliver web content. Never considered that the OS might have such a big impact. But I wonder if a finely tuned php setup with nginx on Debian will be at par with a similar setup on Ubuntu 22.04. Nevertheless, this has definitely convinced me to jump ship and try next deployments on Ubuntu. Thank u @piotr for ur hard work.

I will test exactly that in upcoming video of big web server comparision! Different panels, different OSes and own tweaks and we will see how much efforts it takes to outperform stock paid solutions like CPanel

AXYZE

I will also add important info - all tests were done with minimum of 3 runs.
If there was margin of error / difference percentage higher than 1.5% I've done more runs. So in the end, results that you see are within 0.5-1.5% margin of error.

So its not like CentOS 7 lower PHPBench is "random", it is consistently that bad. That's because of very ancient kernel & ancient compiler that doesn't know how to work with any modern CPU. It is very clearly visible with interpreted languages such as PHP. Same thing will happen with anything JS (Node, Express, Koa...).

Going with any lower margin of error is kinda impossible on VPS where there is also random turbo boost from CPU.

Mr. @jsg do you have any suggestions how to improve my tests even more? Should I include something extra?

emgh

@AXYZE said:

@raza19 said:
For years I've been using Debian on my servers to deliver web content. Never considered that the OS might have such a big impact. But I wonder if a finely tuned php setup with nginx on Debian will be at par with a similar setup on Ubuntu 22.04. Nevertheless, this has definitely convinced me to jump ship and try next deployments on Ubuntu. Thank u @piotr for ur hard work.

I will test exactly that in upcoming video of big web server comparision! Different panels, different OSes and own tweaks and we will see how much efforts it takes to outperform stock paid solutions like CPanel

Include GridPane.

AXYZE

@emgh said:

@AXYZE said:

@raza19 said:
For years I've been using Debian on my servers to deliver web content. Never considered that the OS might have such a big impact. But I wonder if a finely tuned php setup with nginx on Debian will be at par with a similar setup on Ubuntu 22.04. Nevertheless, this has definitely convinced me to jump ship and try next deployments on Ubuntu. Thank u @piotr for ur hard work.

I will test exactly that in upcoming video of big web server comparision! Different panels, different OSes and own tweaks and we will see how much efforts it takes to outperform stock paid solutions like CPanel

Include GridPane.

Great idea!
For now my list includes:
CPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, KeyHelp, Centminmod, Slickstack, Wordops, Enhance.com and now GridPane

besides that installation from system repo and doing all manually + custom compilations with tweaks.

I will focus on Wordpress tests (classic homepage load test, but I'll also load test WooCommerce actions like Add to cart), but also:

• load test of static page generated with Nuxt with couple of images
• load test of loading single image (but there probably will be 0 difference, limitation will be network)

stoned

@AXYZE said: I decided to benchmark distros that are available with every provider.

Hi. Thanks for a great video and presentation, and thanks for your reply. I use Debian 11, then Proxmox on top, and in containers I use Alpine, so I'd still be interested in its performance, especially as an LXC container.

emgh

@AXYZE said:

@emgh said:

@AXYZE said:

@raza19 said:
For years I've been using Debian on my servers to deliver web content. Never considered that the OS might have such a big impact. But I wonder if a finely tuned php setup with nginx on Debian will be at par with a similar setup on Ubuntu 22.04. Nevertheless, this has definitely convinced me to jump ship and try next deployments on Ubuntu. Thank u @piotr for ur hard work.

I will test exactly that in upcoming video of big web server comparision! Different panels, different OSes and own tweaks and we will see how much efforts it takes to outperform stock paid solutions like CPanel

Include GridPane.

Great idea!
For now my list includes:
CPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, KeyHelp, Centminmod, Slickstack, Wordops, Enhance.com and now GridPane

besides that installation from system repo and doing all manually + custom compilations with tweaks.

I will focus on Wordpress tests (classic homepage load test, but I'll also load test WooCommerce actions like Add to cart), but also:

• load test of static page generated with Nuxt with couple of images
• load test of loading single image (but there probably will be 0 difference, limitation will be network)

Nice!

More suggestions (but I have no real interest in them personally):
easyengine
webinoly
runcloud
cloudways
serverpilot
spinupwp

Used them all but spinupwp.

My production has been on gridpane for about a year.