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kernel:[61609207.604309] NMI: IOCK error (debug interrupt?) for reason 71 on CPU 0.

Uh-oh...

#SysAdmining

#sysadmining
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
•

It looks like I'm going to have to move server, and the offer I got isn't available anymore at my current hosting provider, which means I'm going to have to pay more or get less.

I currently have: for 20 euros/month:

  • CPU: Intel® C2750 (Avoton)
  • Memory: 8 GB
  • Disk: 1 TB
  • Price: 20€/month


The currently available offers that are close to this are:
Start-1-L

  • CPU: Intel® Xeon E3 1220v2
  • Memory: 16 GB
  • Disk: 2 x 1 TB
  • Price: 21€/month


or
Pro-4-S

  • CPU: Intel® Xeon E3 1245v5
  • Memory: 32 GB
  • Disk: 3 x 250 GB SSD
  • Price: 23€/month


My main question is: is the C2750 so much better thanks to its 8 threads than the Xeon E3? I only use my server as a web server, so isn't the thread count more important?

Would the unavailability of the C2750 be a good enough reason to move provider?

#SysAdmining #SysAdmin #Help #Hosting

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Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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Ping @silverwizard maybe you have an opinion on rack server CPUs?
@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  

@Hypolite Petovan so yeah - a DB ssrver wants RAM and a webserver wants Threads

These dayz thread numbers are massively important compared to single core performance (this is a rule of thumb, don't take it seriously).

I would pay the €2 for the 16 GB of RAM alone if I was hosting a DBed app like Friendica.

For disks the SSD will likely serve you better than the space, unless your workload is different than I suspect.

Rightsize to workload though

@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
•

@silverwizard This is my current disk usage:

# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           795M  456K  794M   1% /run
/dev/sda2       916G  176G  694G  21% /
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1       180M   50M  118M  30% /boot
none            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /run/user/1019
none            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /run/user/1018
none            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /run/user/0

And memory usage:
# free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.8Gi       3.9Gi       156Mi       126Mi       4.1Gi       3.8Gi
Swap:          5.2Gi       1.9Gi       3.3Gi

And my bespoke MariaDB config values:
[mysqld]

innodb_force_recovery = 0
innodb_file_per_table = 1

table_definition_cache = 4096
table_open_cache = 3000

#performance_schema      = on

max_connections         = 200
max_binlog_size   = 100M

# Recommended by mysqltuner on 02-05-2018
innodb_buffer_pool_size      = 5G
innodb_buffer_pool_instances = 6

I'm a little intimidated by the 3 x SSD, I suppose I should enable some kind of RAID but I've never done that before.

@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  

@Hypolite Petovan yeah - so that's good, you're not mem stressing (could probably bump buffer if you had more ram)

Is this a dedicated server? If so - yeah - RAID5 or bust, linux softraid wasn't designed by a monste, but it's nowhere near ZFS so I've not used it in years, mdadm is your manpage starting point, but I am out of info. If you are anyway virtualized, don't use RAID

But yeah - threads feel like you're limiter

@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@silverwizard It is a dedicated server, I wouldn't go for virtualized, I don't trust it. Thanks for the pointers!
@silverwizard
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@silverwizard Also none of the other hosting providers I've looked have any price remotely close to these for equivalent hardware, so I'm not likely to change.
@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  
@Hypolite Petovan yeah - those numbers are *amazing*, I am jealous of that disk allocation
@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@silverwizard And yet I've had some hard swapping episodes, like last week. Some Friendica CLI PHP process just takes up all the CPU and the memory for several minutes.

I have very little use for storage, either on this server or anywhere else, so even 1 TB is overkill.

@silverwizard
silverwizard
silverwizard  
@Hypolite Petovan yeah - I know my instance does a lot of bursty memory needs, but going from 8 to 16 is likely reasonable, but if you get 32, caches could get bigger
@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
•
@silverwizard Oooh, the Xeon E3 1245v5 has 8 cores! Sounds like a no-brainer for me for 3€/month more than what I pay now.
@silverwizard
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
•

So the plot thickens, for my current server I've been paying:

  • 16€ from January 2016 to December 2021 (5 full years)
  • 17€ from January 2022 to November 2022 (11 months)
  • 19.5€ from December 2022 to September 2023 (10 months so far)


I remember being skittish about upgrading when I was paying 16€ a month, but the price hike has made it relatively more palatable. Good job price hike!

silverwizard
silverwizard  
@A Sweet Gentleman @Hypolite Petovan Honestly, feels that way for me a lot of the time. There's a lot of numbers, easy to get lost in because the definitions are messy, but I always hope I give good advice.
@Hypolite Petovan @A Sweet Gentleman
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@Andy H3 I've been told by a support technician that I will be able to set it up during installation. I saw that with 3 disks I can go for a RAID 5 setup which would be ideal given that my backup hygiene is severely lacking.
@Andy H3
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@Andy H3 I didn't get that many details, I'll go through the install wizard and then I'll assess the situation from the command-line.
@Andy H3
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@Andy H3 I wonder how long my Friendica node will be unavailable! 🎲
@Andy H3
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