Hardware Upgrades

I recently spent some time upgrading Feedbin’s hardware, and wanted to share the results.

Feedbin is a Ruby on Rails app, and for the most part Rails is constrained by the single-threaded performance of a CPU. So for the application servers that means favoring higher-clocked CPUs at the expense of number of cores.

The application servers use Intel Xeon E3-1270V6 CPUs. This is a four-core 3.8Ghz CPU. Each application server is configured with 16GB of DDR4 RAM. The application servers primarily run Unicorn and Sidekiq. This amount of RAM gives the processes plenty of room to spread out.

One measurement that is CPU constrained is view generation.

This chart shows the 95th percentile performance of all views generated by Feedbin. 95th percentile means that 95% of all views were generated in less time than the line in the chart. Michael Kopp wrote a good overview of how average performance can be misleading and the benefits of measuring in percentiles instead.

Looks like the new hardware gives us a nice 20%+ boost in performance.

The database servers were also upgraded. These servers are configured with dual Intel Xeon Gold 5120 CPUs. Each CPU has 14 2.2Ghz cores. With hyperthreading, that gives them an embarrassing 56 usable threads. They also have 64GB of DDR4 RAM and use Intel S3710 Series SSDs for primary storage. They each have secondary SSDs used for PostgreSQL’s write-ahead logging, so more disk I/O is available for queries.

This upgrade gives us another nice boost. If you look at the graph, you’ll notice a daily spike. These are the times when the database server is running vacuumdb. This is an important maintenance process that is used to reclaim space and optimize query planning.

Before the upgrade, vacuum caused a significant delay. After the upgrade, the performance at its worst is the same or better than pre-upgrade performance at its best.

Overall I’m happy with the upgrades. The hardware is more expensive now, but it’s important to me that Feedbin always performs well. If I can achieve that by just spending a little more money, then it makes that decision easy.