Ec2 Micro Instance Abilities

Question

I've deployed a ruby on rails website to a ec2 micro instance. Can someone give some input on how much this instance can "handle" (e.g. number of users and/or transactions per second, etc.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Not much.

Here's a great paper that describes how a micro's performance compared to a Nokia N900 smart phone.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amazon_ec2_micro&num=1

The NET was that micros are very low end and can give irregular performance results.

Answer 2

It depends heavily on what your application does, there's no fix number! Of course it'll be more limited on CPU time and memory than a bigger instance, but your only shot at getting a coherent number is to run a stress test.

Answer 3

See if you can get another EC2 instance and get the two to communicate to each other over non-public interfaces. Then, run Siege against it and see how it performs as you adjust your application or web server settings.

Here's a Siege command I use: siege -c 10 -b -t 90s http://site1.testing.myserver.com >/dev/null

This will simulate 10 concurrent connections repeatedly for 90 seconds.

You can also try ab, which ships with Apache: ab -c 100 -n 20000 http://site1.testing.myserver.com

This will use 100 concurrent connections for a total of 20000 page views.

Siege is preferred and is more powerful, but ab is easy to use and already on most systems.