Marco.org

A lot of customers have been choosing DigitalOcean because they were all-SSD and had cheaper RAM until now. Linode’s response is strong: I suspect this will win a lot of people over.

In case anyone’s interested, I ran Geekbench on my Linode on the previous (now-awkwardly named “next-gen”) infrastructure, then upgraded it to the new one (a delightfully easy process — click a link in the dashboard, wait in a queue for a little while, endure about an hour of downtime while it’s migrated, and then it’s done) and re-ran the benchmark.

Here’s how their CPU performance compares: new on left, former “next-gen” on right. The new setup is substantially faster, at about 73% faster at single-threaded tasks and 114% faster at multicore usage, despite a reduction from 8 virtual cores to 6 — clearly, despite the core count, we’re being permitted to use more of the CPU power than before, coming respectably close to this CPU’s bare-metal performance when normalized for core count. Hacker News commenters have even made themselves useful for once and have benchmarked the I/O performance. Subjectively, I’ve found the new hardware to be much faster for my apps.

Competition is great.

(If you’re interested, I have a referral link.)