Performance on new DigitalOcean Premium droplets

Hello everyone,

I’m curious to know if someone has already tested the new premium droplets of DigitalOcean that offer both NVMe SSD and quicker CPUs. As I asume mostly have their Discourse deployed on Droplets (as do I) probably someone already did the resizing.

I am not able to resize my instance and will only be capable to test in the weekend, but if the gains are big enough I might change the region just to do it. :sweat_smile:

More details: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/premium-droplets-intel-cascade-lake-amd-epyc-rome

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Reading the specs it is likely there will be a noticeable difference

Ram speed makes a reasonable difference, top clock speed as well

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I was thinking exactly that. Discourse should benefit a lot from these. Now to see what is better, slightly lower clock speed for faster RAM or viceversa.

Other than rebuilding, what could be a good way to test it? I’m thinking on some stress testing with something like K6 or JMeter

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The ideal test is probably discourse bench:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/bench.rb

Setting it up is a bit tricky, I should at some point make a Dockerfile for it.

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One easy way to test the all around hosting performance @codinghorror uses is timing rebuilds. I went ahead and did a 4 way test in Digital Ocean:

Droplet Type Price Time
Basic $5 5m18.476s
Basic Intel Premium $6 4m19.710s
Basic AMD Premium $6 3m45.489s
CPU Optimized $40 3m33.580s

So, it looks like, for people on the $5 droplet, moving to a $6 AMD one is a pretty good deal.

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