Drupal Benchmarked on Amazon ec2

According to a benchmark test run by John Quinn &  Cailin Nelson,

Drupal systems perform very well on amazon ec2, even with a simple single machine deployment. The larger hardware types perform significantly better, producing up to 12,500 pages per minute. this could be increased significantly by clustering as outlined here.  The apc op-code cache increases performance by a factor of roughly 4x.  The average response times were good in all the tests. The slowest tests yielded average times of 1.5s. again, response times where significantly better on the better hardware and reduced further by the use of apc.

Amazon uses Xen based virtualization technology to implement ec2. The cloud makes provisioning a machine as easy as executing a simple script command. when you are through with the machine, you simply terminate it and pay only for the hours that you’ve used. ec2 provides three types of virtual hardware that you can instantiate.

Source: John & Cailin Blog, “lamp performance on the elastic compute cloud: benchmarking drupal on amazon ec2″, January 28, 2008.

IT Benchmark Spreadsheets

ServiceXen, an IT firm located in Atlanta, Georgia, has provided six (6) interactive spreadsheets to assist in IT benchmarking activities.  Each spreadsheet is a shared Zoho Sheet.  See below:

1. Data Center Security Audit
2. New Employee Cost Calculator
3. Server Buy vs. Lease Calculator
4. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
5. Virtualization Fit Tool

Benchmark: Virtualization at Amazon

Amazon Virtualization

Virtualization Benchmark

Amazon sold storage to external customers for 15 cents/GB/month (estimated).

Bechtel’s internal storage costs were $3.75/GB/month.

WHAT BECHTEL LEARNED: Amazon could sell storage cheaply, Ramleth believes, because its servers were more highly utilized.

Source: CIO Magazine, Bechtel’s New Benchmarks, October 24, 2008.