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I have just subscribed to a new dedicated server and am getting worse than expected PHP execution performance. Execution times are twice as high as on my old shared server!

I'm definitely not an expert at server management, so I'm wondering what I missed.

Here is some stuff that might help figure out what's wrong here:

Is it normal to get such poor performance after a kernel update and a basic apt-get install for apache2 and php?

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  • You get what you pay for in this case. Were you really expecting a 10 Euro server to have significant performance? That's about as expensive as some cheap VPSs. Just because it's "dedicated", doesn't mean it's powerful.
    – devicenull
    Nov 10, 2012 at 4:03
  • Yes I know that. I was just really surprised it was slower than a mutualized server. And I bought it just to give it a try. Nov 10, 2012 at 4:11
  • @PierreEspenan I edited my answer with details of what you actually bought, so you've got some additional information. It's a very low cost, low power usage blade server. Nov 10, 2012 at 4:18

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Doesn't sound normal, but I suspect I know what the problem is.

Processeur 1x VIA® Nano® U2250

I'm not positive, because it's in French, and the supplied link is not loading for me, but that's a processor for notebooks (low-end laptops).

Check some benchmarks here, and this page I found through Google with some product information.

The VIA Nano U2250 is a power efficient processor for small and light laptops / netbooks. IT is clocked from 1.3 GHz upwards (in the Samsung NC20 1.5 GHz). It is the counterpart to the Intel Atom processors and slightly faster than a 1.6 GHz Atom (at 1.5 GHz).

The power consumption of 10 Watt is higher than the Atom counterparts, but VIA states a low idle power consumption of 200mW.

I'm really surprised it's only half as slow as what you had before. But now you know why the price for a dedicated "server" is only 10 Euros, at least.

Edit:

Since I use Dell servers as often as I can, and this intrigued me, I looked into it a bit, and what you actually have is a dedicated Dell XS11-VX8 "Fortuna" server. It's a mini-server; a type of "blade" server that is particularly focused on blade density and power efficiency, and marketed at large datacenters. You can get twice as many of these in the same rack space as with a typical HP or IBM bladecenter, and at [significantly] less than 10% of the power draw. They launched back in 2009, at a list price of $399 each. In contrast, to, for example, the 12 HP blades I installed recently, that listed at ~$8500 each.

So, yes, you did get a server, and a Dell server at that (though I notice their link to Dell doesn't actually go to the product page), but you got a very low performance one whose primary purpose in life is to save large datacenters (and your hosting company) lots of money on very large scale blade server deployments.

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  • Thanks for the edit! I had some discussion with people from the hosting company, and effectively, it's undersized for my use :( Nov 10, 2012 at 4:24

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