I had to benchmark an EC2 instance to see whether a database
could be safely moved to it. It is a good practice, which helps
avoiding surprises when an instance or its storage are allocated
in a noisy neighborhood, where the neighbors use so much
resources that it affects the performance of our MySQL database.
It is understandable that one can never get very reliable results
on EC2, this is a shared environment after all, and that some
fluctuations should be expected, however it is still good to know
the numbers. I started my benchmarks and everything seemed fine
at first, but then sometimes statistics I was getting started
looking quite odd.
I was running the benchmarks on a High-CPU Extra Large
Instance and couldn’t see any reliability in the results at
all. I mean, in one moment I was getting poor throughput and
horrible response times only to see it improve a lot a few
minutes later. I ruled out a possibility that it could be …
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