Tech4Him – Technology with Integrity

Yup, I learned this week just how well Drupal can fly. Well, maybe not measured in feet above the earth but certainly in terms of response time. Come take a look at a new setup were are testing out.

This week we got fed up with such terribly sporadic performance on a MediaTemple grid server account. After many months of watching performance go from acceptable to abysmal, we finally said “enough” with a few sites that were running on this account.

We had just finished doing a major migration of another few of sites to a new MediaTemple Rage dedicated virtual server. The DV’s at MediaTemple are fantastic. After a day of tuning and tweaking, those sites are humming. But, I think this is what really caused the decision to leave the grid server account for some other sites. Grid server performance was terrrible if you site was not a significantly active site.

After a bit of digging, I decide to try my hand at the Linode.com VPS route. Linode.com has long been praised in Drupal circles for their value/performance proposition. Essentially a Linode is a linux virtual server in a Xen environment. Now, please note that this is not for the faint of heart. These are raw server distributions. No web server, mysql, php, control panel pre-installed. You are building your linux server from scratch. Be fore-warned.

It’s been many moons since I did Unix admin work, let alone Linux. I’ve been spoiled by Plesk and cPanel with most hosts. So this was certainly a challenge. Linode provides some very basic tutorials for getting your LAMP server setup in your choice of linux distributions. Again, these tutorials are very basic and will not suffice for long term hosting and certainly don’t secure your server.

One nice thing about Linode.com is a very active community in both their forums and IRC (#linode). I popped into irc and asked a few basic questions. I got some decent help right away, along with the usual, “stupid noobie” style remarks. Oh well, ignore the chaff.

Upon signing up for my Linode 540 I had a running server in about 34 minutes. Of course, I learned a few things, trashed it and made a new server. Man, my command line Apache2 skills have vastly improved in the last 24 hours.

Luckily I could just “rsync” all the files for a site from the old grid server, directly to my new linode super fast. Mysql db backup and then resotred to the linode server. Then I edited my /windows/system32/drives/etc/host file to point www.myexample.com to the new linode IP. This let me test the site on the linode server without changing DNS for the time being. (Heck, you don’t want your sites down, right?)

I typed the url into my browser and in less than 1 second the page was rendering. Wow! Now compare that to the 15 second lag time on the grid server for a first time hit. Incredible. Of course, I had to run through lots of site pages just to keep seeing that great response time.

Now for my test installation I went with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS OS image. Then, this great Aegir prep article on Drupal.org was used as a basis for the install. The only difference was that that instead of manually installing Apache2 and Mysql I installed the lamp-server^ package which does this and more for you. (Don’t forget the ^ carrot as part of the package name.)

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

I also found that a particular plugin for Wordpress needed curl instead of wget. So a quick install of php5-curl did the trick.

sudo apt-get install php5-curl

For those that don’t want to deal with command line might want to look at the VirtualMin GPL product which provides a web based interface to manage your hosting sever. The automatic install is a breeze but you’ll need to do some reading to understand how to create your first virtual server and such. For us, we stuck to the command line.

One thing that I guess I didn’t get right away was that one linode package equals a single linux server. The reason for this is that I’m used to VMware environments where it is nothing to bring up a new VM on any one host. For some reason my brain was thinking of the linode as the host, not the guest. Oh well. My bad for adding a second ip address to my account, create new disk images and then realize, “How do I boot this second system?”. Doh! You can’t.

Of course, it is easy enough order another linode and move disk images between linodes. Also, Linode bills per month (or annually) but you get credit for days not used. So…you can add a linode to create a new “hosting server”, set it up the way you want it, migrate everything from your current linode and then delete the old linode. Doing this, will credit you for the unused days in the billing cycle for the old linode. Essentially, you pay for each days use which is great for minimal cost + flexibility.

On average, a Linode 360 host has 40 Linodes on it. A Linode 540 host has on average 30. Linode 720 host: 20 Linodes; Linode 1080 host: 15; Linode 1440 host: 10; Linode 2880: 5.

Another exciting item is the announced Linode API. This new api is clean and provides 30+ methods for managing Linode accounts. I am interested at looking into this more and could easily see someone building a module for Aegir to provision more Linodes as needed for new Drupal sites, etc… This has got to have quite a big potential for folks wanting to automate Drupal hosting but want to stay away from the Plesk and cPanel type offerings.

As for flying, on the MediaTemple (gs) account, it would average between 2-10 seconds (2000+ ms) for TTFB for a lightly used site. Now the same site is pulling 400-800 ms TTFB. Now that’s a difference and in my opinion worth the extra administration. Even our MediaTemple (DV) rage is pulling TTFB of around 600-800 ms.

Linode 540              $39.95/mo     400-800 ms TTFB
MediaTemple (gs)        $20.00/mo     > 2000 ms TTFB
MediaTemple (dv) Rage   $100.00/mo    600-800 ms TTFB

All in all, the linode service has been great, performance superb and freedom impressive. Only time will tell how well this will stay this way, but judging by the many others praising Linodes, the ride should be sweet.

Linode Drupal references:

• http://drupal.org/node/194971
• http://drupal.org/node/547910
• http://www.rundrupal.com/linode-review
• http://www.linodereview.com/linode-drupal
• http://hostingfu.com/article/linode-xen-vps-review
• http://www.jeffbeeman.com/node/23

Recent write-up

• http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/219401166

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