# We have constructed additional Pylons (BuyVM Upgrades)



## Aldryic C'boas (Sep 21, 2013)

Hey folks!

Some exciting news this weekend.  First off, if you haven't heard yet, our DDoS-Filtering is now live in our Buffalo deployment!  DDoS-Filtered IPs can be ordered with any new/existing service just like the Las Vegas services.  Cost is 4,00$ per month per IP, and the mitigation is being done upstream by our friends at Staminus.

 

Next up.. we will (very Soon™) be allowing folks with 128MB OpenVZ plans in our Las Vegas deployment to upgrade those VMs to a 256MB or higher plan if desired!  All that's required is opening a support ticket, and we'll handle the rest.  You will be able to either remain on the annual billing cycle native to the 128s, or move to another billing cycle if necessary.  Please note that this is only available in Las Vegas at this time, and we ask that you wait until October 1st or later to request an upgrade.  Again, this is Las Vegas only - the Buffalo location is not eligible at this time (but will be at a later date).

 

Also coming up in Vegas - All 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB OpenVZ plans will be transitioning to SSD nodes!  There is no change in cost or resources, nor will there be any downtime.  We already have a schedule (which won't be publicly released as a security precaution, sorry!) of when specific nodes will be migrated to SSD - so please do not request priority on being migrated to an SSD node or open tickets asking when your specific VPS/node will be moved.  All non-128MB OpenVZ plans will be fully moved over to the new SSD nodes by the end of the year.  Please remember, this is also a Las Vegas-only upgrade!  We will not be performing any upgrades to our Buffalo location until after we've moved to a new datacentre (more details on that to be announced at a later date).

 

We're also increasing the resources for the OpenVZ 1GB and 2GB plans!  Once migrated to the SSD nodes, the 1GB plans will have 90GB of SSD space, and 5TB (per month) of transit.  The 2GB plans will be increased to 120GB of SSD space, and 10TB of monthly transit.  These upgrades will not increase plan costs, and will be available on each VPS as they are migrated to the SSD nodes.  Please remember that we already have a schedule planned, and we will not be allowing folks to 'cut in line' or get priority on their migrations, so please don't ask!

 

KVM is not being ignored!  Although we will not be upgrading the Las Vegas KVM nodes to SSD until an undetermined time next year (we're still planning out the details, and want to get OpenVZ done before we get started), we have decided to move away from the E3 processors to dual hex-core L5639s.  This wasn't an easy call to make, but the E3s were simply too limiting on core counts to really meet our standards.  All KVM nodes, including the Storage nodes, will be receiving this upgrade.  We will also be increasing the core count on KVM plans to fall in line with our OpenVZ lineup.  The changes will be as follows:


256MB KVM:       1 Core -> 2 Cores
1024MB KVM:     2 Cores -> 4 Cores
2048MB KVM:     2 Cores -> 4 Cores
250GB Storage:   1 Core -> 2 Cores
500GB Storage:   1 Core -> 2 Cores
1TB Storage:       2 Cores -> 4 Cores
These upgrades will be taking place at the end of October - individual announcements will be made for each node in advance of the maintenance.  Like before, this also only applies to the Las Vegas location.  The New York deployment will be brought up to matching spec after we've located a new datacentre (again, more details to follow at a later date).

 

Getting away from hardware talk for a moment:  as those of you using the gateway have likely aleady heard, Google Checkout will no longer be a payment option come the end of November.  While I haven't yet made a final decision on what will take it's place for accepting Debit/Credit card payments (currently testing and favouring Amazon SimplePay), rest assured that we will have a Debit/Credit replacement deployed and ready before Checkout expires.

 

That's all we have for now - as always, it's our pleasure to have such awesome clients, and we look forward to improving on the services we can offer you.  If you have any questions/comments/concerns, please feel free to Contact Us or open a Support Ticket, and we'll be happy to elaborate more for you.

 

</poweroverwhelming>


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## HalfEatenPie (Sep 21, 2013)

I. Love. StarCraft.  References.


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## Quexis (Sep 21, 2013)

Nice additions, and 10/10 title.


Good work guys.


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## vanarp (Sep 21, 2013)

Wish you all the best with your upgrades!!!


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## Ruchirablog (Sep 21, 2013)

Aldryic C said:


> we have decided to move away from the E3 processors to dual hex-core L5639s.  This wasn't an easy call to make, but the E3s were simply too limiting on core counts to really meet our standards.  All KVM nodes, including the Storage nodes, will be receiving this upgrade.


How can you call this an upgrade?  :mellow:  L5639's are too old with slow cores. If you want to upgrade why not at least use newer E5's ? E3 processor per core performance is amazing and this is a one reason I got a KVM VPS from you guys. 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+L5639+%40+2.13GHz&id=1983&cpuCount=2

- BuyVM KVM and OpenVZ customer


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## vanarp (Sep 21, 2013)

@Ruchirablog

Read this.. http://vpsboard.com/topic/1978-im-being-stolen-from-not-really-what-is-reasonable-kvm-steal/#entry31266


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## Francisco (Sep 21, 2013)

Ruchirablog said:


> How can you call this an upgrade?  :mellow:  L5639's are too old with slow cores. If you want to upgrade why not at least use newer E5's ? E3 processor per core performance is amazing and this is a one reason I got a KVM VPS from you guys.
> 
> http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+L5639+%40+2.13GHz&id=1983&cpuCount=2
> 
> - BuyVM KVM and OpenVZ customer


The E3's are nice but there simply isn't enough cores to make it worth it to us.

The L5639's are slower Mhz wise but you'll likely get a far more consistent speed since there's no contention.

I could go to E5's but if you check geekbench you'll see that the difference is maybe 10 - 15%.

Francisco


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## Ruchirablog (Sep 21, 2013)

vanarp said:


> @Ruchirablog
> 
> Read this.. http://vpsboard.com/topic/1978-im-being-stolen-from-not-really-what-is-reasonable-kvm-steal/#entry31266


I vote to keep the current E3's


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## drmike (Sep 21, 2013)

Holy freaking update bomb!

*"We will not be performing any upgrades to our Buffalo location until after we've moved to a new datacentre (more details on that to be announced at a later date)."*

Oh yeah, call that official.


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## Francisco (Sep 21, 2013)

Ruchirablog said:


> I vote to keep the current E3's


Some nodes don't need the swap but we'd rather have everything the same.

Besides, with these nodes we can finally offer bigger plans 

Francisco


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## concerto49 (Sep 22, 2013)

Ruchirablog said:


> How can you call this an upgrade?  :mellow:  L5639's are too old with slow cores. If you want to upgrade why not at least use newer E5's ? E3 processor per core performance is amazing and this is a one reason I got a KVM VPS from you guys.
> 
> http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+L5639+%40+2.13GHz&id=1983&cpuCount=2
> 
> - BuyVM KVM and OpenVZ customer


The L5s are more economical compared to E5 I guess. It makes more sense finance wise.

All the best with the upgrades!


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## MartinD (Sep 22, 2013)

...is Fran going to be carrying out any of this work?


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## Francisco (Sep 22, 2013)

MartinD said:


> ...is Fran going to be carrying out any of this work?


All of it  I'll be in Vegas sometime next month to handle it with one of our techs, Matt.

If we needed 384GB+ RAM or things like that in the nodes? Then E5's would be the way to go; but we don't.

We're keeping the nodes at more or less the same load out of VM's which means everyone potentially gains access to 3x more cores.

It also means we'll be able to properly support KVM upgrades since we'll have a lot more breathing room.

The E3's are nice but that's only when they aren't getting dogged. A few stuck VM's at BIOS screens, Windows install screens, etc, will rip through a lot of cores very quickly. Sure, 3Ghz CPU's are great and fast and all that, but it doesn't help at all if you get some stuck clients.

I can assure you, you'll enjoy the breathing room when you're doing compiles and things like that. We have users that use gentoo and they can feel when something is a miss with a node.

Our own monitoring tells us when there's stuck users but we spend too much time busting skulls because someone is spiking.

Francisco


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## bauhaus (Sep 22, 2013)

Francisco said:


> The E3's are nice but that's only when they aren't getting dogged. A few stuck VM's at BIOS screens, Windows install screens, etc, will rip through a lot of cores very quickly. Sure, 3Ghz CPU's are great and fast and all that, but it doesn't help at all if you get some stuck clients.


More cores means more love for everybody. I believe is the right call. Even linode use older ones, charges you more money, and people don't complain.


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## WebSearchingPro (Sep 22, 2013)

Wow BuyVM is upgrading fast now  Hats off to you!


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## raindog308 (Sep 24, 2013)

Are you going to increase transfer for KVMs the way you're doing OvZ?  Just curious.

Good news all around!  I guess Canadians celebrate Christmas in September.


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## Francisco (Sep 24, 2013)

raindog308 said:


> Are you going to increase transfer for KVMs the way you're doing OvZ?  Just curious.
> 
> Good news all around!  I guess Canadians celebrate Christmas in September.


Sleep country~ Canada~

We'll bump KVM's as well 

Francisco


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## The_Hatta (Sep 24, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Sleep country~ Canada~
> 
> 
> ~
> ...


Why buy a mattress anywhere else >_>


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## Francisco (Sep 24, 2013)

The_Hatta said:


> Why buy a mattress anywhere else >_>


And now it's stuck in your head.

:3

Francisco


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## jcaleb (Sep 24, 2013)

upgrade Anthony?


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## Francisco (Sep 24, 2013)

jcaleb said:


> upgrade Anthony?


Hah! Don't be so mean.

We have hired another support worker, he'll start next month.

We'll be dropping the 'unmanaged' tag and change it to 'semi-managed' since we spend a lot of time helping people as it is.

Francsico


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## HalfEatenPie (Sep 24, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Hah! Don't be so mean.
> 
> 
> We have hired another support worker, he'll start next month.
> ...


I hope he is pretty well acquainted with Mr. Alcohol, seeing that (sometime in the future) you'll need him  

Smack talks aside, willing to give us some details on who he is?  At least see if he's willing to introduce himself here!


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## Francisco (Sep 24, 2013)

HalfEatenPie said:


> I hope he is pretty well acquainted with Mr. Alcohol, seeing that (sometime in the future) you'll need him
> 
> Smack talks aside, willing to give us some details on who he is?  At least see if he's willing to introduce himself here!


He can drink as hard as the others, don't worry about that 

He'll introduce himself, but he's one of my best buds.


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## jcaleb (Sep 25, 2013)

Now I can send support tickets again.


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## AnthonySmith (Sep 25, 2013)

What's all this about me?

Yeah its true, I am moonlighting for BuyVM and Inception hosting is a secret brand of BuyVM.

Discuss.


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## willie (Sep 25, 2013)

It looks to me like that passmark score may be for a dual L5639 system, i.e. both sockets put together.  Could it be that slow?

Do you know of some E5 motherboards with 24 dimm slots, so you can put in 384GB without using 32GB dimms?  I didn't realize those existed.

I'd sure like to have direct credit card payment without going through some third party like Amazon, if the company can get the merchant account for that.  For that matter I do't understand why VPS places are so aghast at the concept of payment by check or money order.  They are still used an awful lot in the real world, after all.


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## Francisco (Sep 25, 2013)

We used to accept western union but I always felt it was a pain in the butt since I had to take an hour+ out of my day to go cash things. Even if I didn't have to walk to the nearest WU office, I almost always have to wait at least 20 minutes to get through everything. When we did Frantech we used to insist that people paid 6+ months upfront on WU.

The passmark scores are way off. It's saying that it wasn't all that much more powerful than an L5520 but I can speak from experience that there is a fairly large boost from it.

In single threaded performance the E3 will do way better but we don't sell dedicated cores. If we did we'd have to increase the cost of our KVM plans to make a comfortable profit margin.

Francisco


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## AnthonySmith (Sep 25, 2013)

He never denied it.... just saying


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## Aldryic C'boas (Sep 25, 2013)

jcaleb said:


> Now I can send support tickets again.


There's no reason you can't send tickets now.  The biggest complaint people have about Anthony (and myself) come from the basis that neither of us tolerate special treatment.  If we're not going to do something for all clients, we're not going to make exceptions for specific people - and a lot of folks take that personally for some reason.  That said, if you can reference a ticket where someone was truly out of line in how they handled it, I'll be happy to look into that for you.


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## jcaleb (Sep 25, 2013)

boss Aldryic, just joking. you guys are great people.


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## Shados (Sep 25, 2013)

Francisco said:


> We used to accept western union but I always felt it was a pain in the butt since I had to take an hour+ out of my day to go cash things. Even if I didn't have to walk to the nearest WU office, I almost always have to wait at least 20 minutes to get through everything. When we did Frantech we used to insist that people paid 6+ months upfront on WU.
> 
> 
> The passmark scores are way off. It's saying that it wasn't all that much more powerful than an L5520 but I can speak from experience that there is a fairly large boost from it.
> ...


Couldn't you just do like quarterly pro-rating on WU transactions with a hard deadline so you only need to go down there like four times a year?


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## Francisco (Sep 25, 2013)

Shados said:


> Couldn't you just do like quarterly pro-rating on WU transactions with a hard deadline so you only need to go down there like four times a year?


Always possible but I don't see many users wanting to pay with WU 

The problem isn't so much WU, it's getting me to actually go down to do pickups. I get fairly 'Ugh I hate doign this' when it comes to WU.

The fees are nasty. Customer wants to pay for a $15/y VPS? It'll cost them $25/y.

Francisco


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## willie (Sep 26, 2013)

Edit: I don't mean to be snarking so much or taking the thread off topic, so sorry about that.  Good job on the SSD plans.  I'm using SSD's in almost everything now.  I don't want to use hard drives any more except for bulk storage.


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## Francisco (Sep 26, 2013)

Aldryic is the billing manager but I'm still the owner so cash comes to me 

WU is for countries that don't have easy access to paypal (usually Philippines, etc). There's no reason for Aldryic to be picking up the payments since he'd have to then go through the trouble of adding it to his bank account and transferring it to me. We don't have a real office where we all gather or anything.

The only time we really see each other is during company vacations 

Francisco


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## jcaleb (Sep 26, 2013)

I thought before your office is inside coresite. just a few steps away from your servers


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## VPSCorey (Sep 26, 2013)

Linode kept the old L series for years but recently went to E5 2645's or something the 2.7ghz models hex cores.


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## jcaleb (Sep 26, 2013)

and Francisco walks in the office every morning, bringing everybody their coffee


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## jcaleb (Sep 26, 2013)

are the opterons better than e5?


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## Francisco (Sep 26, 2013)

jcaleb said:


> I thought before your office is inside coresite. just a few steps away from your servers


 Nope. EGI's offices are on the 16th floor of coresite so they were 6 floors away from the racks we had in on the 10th floor. One of our workers, Matt, used to handle our onsite support.



FRCorey said:


> Linode kept the old L series for years but recently went to E5 2645's or something the 2.7ghz models hex cores.


Personally I like the L56xx's. They handle well and come close enough to the E5's to make me have to fight to justify upgrading to them. Our KVM boxes aren't busy enough to justify E5's, nor do I want to have to load them higher to try to make the E5's worth it. Loading them higher simply leads us down the same path.

We felt this was the most reasonable route.

Francisco


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## Francisco (Sep 26, 2013)

jcaleb said:


> are the opterons better than e5?


Clock for clock? No. The opterons do support 4 physical CPU's in a server though.

To be honest I didn't even look at opterons but a quick search around shows it'd be quite expensive and require us to upgrade our power.

Francisco


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## willie (Sep 26, 2013)

Francisco said:


> . There's no reason for Aldryic to be picking up the payments since he'd have to then go through the trouble of adding it to his bank account and transferring it to me. We don't have a real office where we all gather or anything.
> 
> 
> The only time we really see each other is during company vacations


We use a lot of video chat where I work and it's fun.  Remote staff fly in every few months.  It's reasonably affordable.

Usuallly by the time a business reaches your size (actually much earlier), it has company bank accounts.  So this transferring stuff just sounds perplexing.  Maybe the international angle makes it more complicated or something.

We do international payments by wire transfer, but I guess the amounts are usually in the K$ and up, so the fees don't eat too much of it.  Probably wouldn't work for VPS.


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## Francisco (Sep 26, 2013)

We have company accounts but still, WU is a pain in the butt 

Some users do pay by it. They end up paying an extra $5 - $10 in fee's on a $5/m VPS.

It sucks but for them it's likely the only way to order.

Francisco


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## SkylarM (Sep 26, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Nope. EGI's offices are on the 16th floor of coresite so they were 6 floors away from the racks we had in on the 10th floor. One of our workers, Matt, used to handle our onsite support.
> 
> Personally I like the L56xx's. They handle well and come close enough to the E5's to make me have to fight to justify upgrading to them. Our KVM boxes aren't busy enough to justify E5's, nor do I want to have to load them higher to try to make the E5's worth it. Loading them higher simply leads us down the same path.
> 
> ...


We've been running L5520's, but have started to transition into the Hex Core L56xx's. Older hardware means less ram, but as you said means less container density which ends up being a net gain. Similar CPU power in the E5's, just more customers which means less CPU access per client which just doesn't seem worth the additional cost to me.

Best of luck with the upgrades, BuyVM just keeps gettin better


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## Francisco (Sep 26, 2013)

SkylarM said:


> We've been running L5520's, but have started to transition into the Hex Core L56xx's. Older hardware means less ram, but as you said means less container density which ends up being a net gain. Similar CPU power in the E5's, just more customers which means less CPU access per client which just doesn't seem worth the additional cost to me.
> 
> Best of luck with the upgrades, BuyVM just keeps gettin better


We used to use L5520's but we moved to L5638's for almost all of our OpenVZ nodes last year. The L5520's we nice but it was easy to bog them down during busy times. The L5638's were really worth it and was likely one of the better investments we've made.

The SSD's are the next big investment we're making. I can't remember the last time I saw someone complain about CPU processing. The biggest complaint right now is lag due to iowait spikes so the SSD's will for sure fix that.

Francisco


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## willie (Sep 26, 2013)

I gotta wonder how the dual L5639's compare in power consumption to Ivy Bridge or Haswell cpu's with the same amount of cpu speed.  If there's a 50 watt difference, that might be $100 per year per node or $300 in a 3-year lifecycle, depending on what you're paying per amp in the data center.  That might justify E5 all by itself.

I've found passmarks to be very accurate for predicting cpu throughput on my own workloads, though my stuff is computation-intensive and not anything like vps hosting.  Passmarks still might be ok as a rough comparison for vps.


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## Francisco (Sep 26, 2013)

We need the cores, though.

It doesn't matter if we have 6 cores that are 4Ghz each if some vm's get in a busy loop, etc.

An E5 will be at best the same power usage. You can get 60W E5's but you will pay out the nose for them.

Francisco


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## sundaymouse (Sep 26, 2013)

I like your title.


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## jcaleb (Sep 26, 2013)

Can you comfortably say Fiberhub is a good home for your servers


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## Francisco (Sep 26, 2013)

jcaleb said:


> Can you comfortably say Fiberhub is a good home for your servers


Yep.

They've had their issues but they were honest, didn't bullshit us, and have gone to good lengths to address it and document it.

They keep in close touch about changes they're making as well as ETA's as they get them.

I'm not happy with the power stuff but I would rather be in a place that has fixed our network than be dealing with shit in SJC still.

Francisco


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## willie (Sep 27, 2013)

Francisco said:


> We need the cores, though.
> 
> 
> It doesn't matter if we have 6 cores that are 4Ghz each if some vm's get in a busy loop, etc.


Is this some kind of deficiency in OpenVZ, that it can let a runaway process hose a hardware core, instead of limiting to some percentage?  Or if you want to allow cpu bursting, could you dynamically throttle if cpu stays above 80% for 2 minutes or something like that?


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## Francisco (Sep 27, 2013)

willie said:


> Is this some kind of deficiency in OpenVZ, that it can let a runaway process hose a hardware core, instead of limiting to some percentage?  Or if you want to allow cpu bursting, could you dynamically throttle if cpu stays above 80% for 2 minutes or something like that?


This is KVM.

Sure, weights and such come into play but it still means that users are fighting with a VPS that's acting up or being abusive.

What if 4 VM's act up ripping up CPU or are stuck in some sort of kernel panic/install busy loop? You've eaten 4 whole threads while the other 30 - 40 people on there are having to share just 4 cores.

The E3's are nice but they just aren't neighbour friendly.

Francisco


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## willie (Sep 28, 2013)

Francisco said:


> What if 4 VM's act up ripping up CPU or are stuck in some sort of kernel panic/install busy loop? You've eaten 4 whole threads while the other 30 - 40 people on there are having to share just 4 cores.
> 
> 
> The E3's are nice but they just aren't neighbour friendly.


I thought a KVM container was just a giant user program running under timesharing like any other user program under a host kernel.  As such the host kernel should be able to control the total CPU consumption of the client container.  Is Xen better about this?  I remember hearing something to that effect, that this was the reason cloud services like EC2 use Xen.

I can accept that more cores is better on the general principle that more cores means more cycles, and more cycles is better.  But if the granularity of cores is that visible, that means the timesharing abstraction isn't working that well.


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## Nick (Sep 28, 2013)

Holy... I come on for a quick lurk and look at what I see! Well done team!


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