All posts by Mike Gunderloy

Double Shot #1761

The SaaS CTO Security Checklist – There is way too much shit to worry about these days.
Distrusting new WoSign and StartCom certificates – And speaking of security, looks like Mozilla has reached the point of being completely fed up with WoSign.
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Double Shot #1760

The VeraCrypt Audit Results – All in all, it came through pretty well, and critical issues have been fixed.
Hash#compact and Hash#compact! now part of Ruby 2.4 – One less reason to load ActiveSupport.
Announcement: Requiring Certificate Transpare…

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Double Shot #1759

Thredded – Forum and message boad engine for Rails 4.2+.
Running Ruby apps in production – Introducing procodile, a Procfile-based production supervisor.
Bedrock – Rock-solid distributed data – A networking and distributed transaction layer built…

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Double Shot #1758

i18n_yaml_sorter – This came in handy when I had a couple of big YAML files to neaten up. It’s aimed at Rails internationalization but certainly not limited to that use case.
10 Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes – Amen to this. I very seld…

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Double Shot #1757

HawkPost – Steps towards secure encrypted uploads to a self-hosted server.
Hotfix Your Ubuntu Kernels with the Canonical Livepatch Service! – The ops guys I know are excited about this.
Gatling – Deployment services for Phoenix applications.

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Double Shot #1756

Errdo – Embed an error tracker directly in your Rails application.
Marathono – GUI tool for managing long-running processes in MacOS 10.10+.
Exploring CLI Best Practices – Some thoughts on writing good tools.

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Double Shot #1755

bitwarden – Free, open-source password manager.
Resinos – Run docker containers on embedded devices. Useful if you want to save money on your company’s server infrastructure by moving it all to Raspberry Pis.
The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services…

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Double Shot #1754

Sublimerge 3 – Commercial diff/merge tool that runs directly inside of Sublime Text 3.
glean – 5×10 pixel programming font, for the times when you want to cram a lot of code on your screen at once.
Netlify – Easy and performant website hosting fo…

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Double Shot #1753

Git the Princess! – How to save the princess in 8 programming languages. A comic from Toggl.
TaskJuggler – Project management via structured text files that can be rendered into HTML. Works surprisingly well.
SQL Style Guide – A starting point fo…

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Double Shot #1752

Botstack – Facebook chatbot development with Ruby on Rails.
Why I hate iOS as a developer – This one sums up pretty much all of the reasons I walked away from iOS development (well, he doesn’t mention that XCode is a crashy piece of shit) and am p…

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Instance Type Loop (sec) Test suite (sec) m1.large 47 79 m2.xlarge 28 51 c1.medium 45 67 c1.xlarge 37 63 cc1.4xlarge 27 64

Conclusion

The result seems pretty clear: For serial computation, the high-memory instances (m2.xlarge and above) are the fastest.

(This of course is not because of the RAM, but because their CPUs happen to have the highest serial computation power, as you might expect from the EC2 Compute Unit count provided by Amazon.)

Notes

The timings came back with +/- 1 on the loop, and +/- 2 on the test suite, so at this point I am reasonably confident in the results.

Just to make sure, I launched an m2.4xlarge instance, and as expected, it has the same CPU model and the same timings as m2.xlarge. The only difference is that it comes with 8 cores instead of 2.

I’m not sure why the cluster-compute instance (cc1.4xlarge) is so slow on my test suite, compared to the loop. I launched two different instances, in case I had a “bad apple”, and both came out the same. Perhaps it’s some weird timing issue in my test. But I think more likely, the CPUs in the cluster-compute instances just happen to be very good at this particular loop. (Unlike the loop timings, the slower test suite timing is in line with what you might expect from Amazon’s EC2 Compute Unit count.)

All benchmarks were run on the official Ubuntu 11.04 AMIs, 32-bit for c1.medium, 64-bit for the rest, with EBS for the cc1.4xlarge instance and instance storage for the rest.

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