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Building a Serverbear alternative
Hey guys,
I'm working on an automated benchmark tool for Linux servers and have just finished the MVP, so I figured it would be a great time to get some feedback.
Basically, I want to eventually build a modern better version of Serverbear since it's been pretty much abandoned for the last two years.
At this point I only have two pages:
main page that allows to pick benchmarks to run and generates a shell command
https://serverscope.iobenchmark report page that shows benchmark results (ex.: https://serverscope.io/trials/E3o )
In the next couple months I plan to finish up comparison pages that would allow users to compare aggregated benchmark results between different VPS offers, run lots of benchmarks to collect more data (as I don't expect this thing to become popular any time soon), and add a few other benchmarks into the benchmarking script as it currently only includes dd
, fio
, unixbench
and a bandwidth benchmark via speedtest.net.
The benchmark tool comes as a Python script and here is what it does:
- Checks for dependencies and installs them if needed. Depending on the platform dependencies are either
make
,automake
,gcc
,gcc-c++
,kernel-devel
,libaio-devel
(for yum) orbuild-essential
,libaio-dev
(for apt) - Gets the location of the server from API using
curl
- Collects some server specs using Linux tools like
df
and output of/proc/cpuinfo
/proc/meminfo
- Runs benchmarking tools (
fio
,dd
,unixbench
and a custom bandwidth test) - Uploads the results and returns a link to the report page
I would appreciate all kinds of feedback, especially things that you would like to see implemented such as benchmarks or website features.
Comments
Running one right now. Looks interesting so far
Finished the bench. No link returned though.
that result page looks really awesome man, nice design!! ill try it out.
i ran into an little error while running the commandline provided from serverscope.io.
if you need more information let me know.
Most of the people use servers as web server or apps based on php / apache /nginx , when you say benchmarks, may be you should include such parameters also like how much the vps can serve.
Ugh, I'm sorry about that. Could you share provider / plan and OS? I would really like to troubleshoot that. Thank you!
Hey Mark, thanks for the report. Could you also tell me what OS / version you're running?
Thanks
I agree and I've been trying to come up with a way to implement something like that without requiring too many dependencies. My best idea so far was to put the app into a docker container but that wouldn't work on OpenVZ servers.
I would really appreciate a suggestion on this. Or you would be okay with script installing LAMP? To me that just seems a bit too intrusive.
installing LAMP would be nasty, what if the vps already has LAMP, haven't thought deep into this, it is bit complicated. unless everything can be extracted to a folder , run from there, then delete after completion, (stopping all usual services before running test)
The network part of the result page is a bit confusing. The raw output below says 302 Mbit/s, while above it says 302 MB/s.
This happened to me too, on the OVH network.
Looks good! I'll run a test shortly and let you know my feedback.
Do you have plans to make a page with a "top 100" to compare CPU / RAM / IO performance - basically the same as what Serverbear has? I think such page will definitely have a value as people might want to compare performance of multiple hosting companies.
Debian 7.5 x64
Ugh. Okay. Thanks for the reports guys.
I'm looking into that error 500.
Great catch! Will fix that today as well.
Thank you... Serverbear is broken.
Don't really know that much when it comes to servers and stuff, but love the initiative! I'll make sure to bookmark this for future reference.
Just one question though, will this a free tool or will this be a paid service? Thanks a lot!
Works pretty well: https://serverscope.io/trials/nAr
The disk read test didn't go right though.
The links in both of my emails didnt work.
Will always be free for users. Glad you liked it!
Thanks for reporting back. Would you mind sending me your link? I will make sure it's fixed.
They're correct for me
It might be a good idea to have consistent speed test servers so that we can compare apples to apples across different locations - it would also prevent issues when geo-location fails.
Also it would be nice to include all the human readable stats at the top of the page, rather then strewn throughout.
There was an issue with benchmark on @hawc's server. Has been fixed.
Thanks for raising this issue. I like this! My only concern is that people usually host their servers close to their users, so my assumption is that they care primarily about bandwidth between the server and major providers around it. For example, if I build a website for Canadians I would care only about loading speed for users in North America.
I don't have a solution for this yet. My thinking behind this was that if I take 10 closest servers (and skip the closest one) then I benchmark the connection speed between the host and the outside world. I'm not 100% satisfied with this as major cities would often have 10+ speedtest servers located very close so results are skewed. I'm thinking that I might change it so it skips all the servers that are too close (let's say 10 or 20 km). Would that be a good idea?
Or may be I should pick a few sets of servers and let users decide if they want only servers in their region or across all continents.
I wonder if that happened when you were running a benchmark. I would appreciate a link to that report. Closest servers are found using speedtest.net API and I haven't seen it fail so far.
I assume you're talking about "I/O" tab and I can see how that may be an issue. What if I hide raw output by default and have a link there that would unfold these blocks?
Good to see someone picking up after serverbear, used SB a lot when it was active!
Here's a report for an OVH ssd-vps2 server https://serverscope.io/trials/LqP#system
Your. Responive. Layout needs. Fixing. .. but I like the idea and Domian
I've ran a test as well. I'm happy with the way the results are being showed - good work!
Still a few bugs though. For example, the e-mail "Your benchmark is complete" shows me a completely different IP address - one that definitely doesn't below to us :-):
"ServerScope.io benchmark has been successfully completed for your server hosted by LiteServer (174.4.57.61) located in , Netherlands"
Here is a test of our "OVZ-SSD-1024" plan on a loaded VPS node:
https://serverscope.io/trials/WKK#system
Because? I've never used my phone to watch a benchmark or make one
Yup. This is planned for the next iteration.
Even though almost nobody would benchmark their server via phone, it should be an option to browse the report page using any device.
Oh right! I've setup Cloudflare CDN but forgot the change the way I'm detecting IP addresses.
Similar thing with the location string. I've just updated site to work properly when city is not detected but forgot to update the e-mail template.
Will update that soon. Thanks!
Your service looks pretty nice.
Please add more providers in the selection.
soyoustart and even some german providers would be great