Comments on: Measuring the Performance of Clouds – GoGrid

By: Dave Friedel

Dave Friedel — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:24:21 +0000

I love the concept of the Cloud… but until more specifics and real world people start talking positive about it, I must keep my clients on physical dedicated boxes. I think what is lost on companies offering cloud services is the key issue of client retention. You may trying to draw us to your service but I have an obligation to deliver best class services (regardless of the client) and if I do not – I loose multiple clients while you loose one.

Please continue to advance the technology – many of us are waiting patiently.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:38:56 +0000

Interesting. I'm currently trying to get to the bottom of some IO problems on GoGrid too at the moment. I'm coming across SQL Server errors – where SQL Server is telling me that some IO operations are taking longer than 15 seconds – this sort of thing – http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/arch… – and this is occurring on a brand new server (set up 1 week ago)

The response so far from GG support is that if I add more RAM to the server then these errors will happen less often – which is not really much of a solution. As someone who used to write real time code on DSPs, I'm amazed that anyone should think any IO operation should ever take 15 seconds.

I'm hopeful these problems will be analysed, identified and fixed.

By: Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:42:48 +0000

While I can't address your server environment directly, nor what you have configured therein, the point of the article was to outline other ways of potentially testing a cloud server.

While this has been mentioned already, I would encourage you to re-test on a new server, using both your method and the ones outlined above. Please let me know your results: michael AT gogrid.com.

By: Yoav

Yoav — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:38:26 +0000

Fact is I have been using GoGrid for over 6 month and it's true.
IO performance can sometimes get so bad the entire system is slowed down to a crawl.

The really sad thing is that GoGrid denies such a problem and the good people in Banglore have no idea what they are doing.

Answers from GoGrid regarding this phenomena range from "delete you server and create a new one so you'll get a new node", to "the system was just fine when we looked at it"

So Randy, I invite you to log on to my server and see first hand how i/o performance is indeed a very serious issue at GoGrid.

Personally, I'm just waiting to have time to migrate my system out of here.

By: randybias

randybias — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:52:31 +0000

Raditha,

Thanks for following up. We appreciate your support of the GoGrid service. It's important to us as a business to identify and respond to blog postings like yours. In this case we felt the methodology you used may not fairly represent GoGrid's performance and we wanted to present our case.

Open debates like this are what the Internet is about. We still have some concerns with the methodology that you used, but recognize that you put some effort into trying to make it fair.

Would be happy to work with you on an update to your posting that perhaps uses a few different measures of performance (bonnie++, iozone, dd, and perhaps vmmark?) to compare disk subsystems.

Best,

–Randy