Top all-time · #8489
Jan Rychter
Personal blog · jan.rychter.com/enblog · on HN as jwrprogrammingbusiness
Jan Rychter's personal blog at jan.rychter.com covers programming and business. Since 2009, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “Cloud server CPU performance comparison”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jan Rychter's cloud server CPU benchmark comparing AWS, GCP and Hetzner instances, and cite it on pricing, bare-metal versus cloud, and desktop-versus-server CPU performance.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Jan Rychter: Tech Consulting, Product Development, Data Science.
Most-linked posts?
- Cloud server CPU performance comparison5 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2019-12-12
- X86 assembly encounter2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-12-04
What Hacker News says?
3x seems quite low, I routinely get 7-11x higher performance on Hetzner when compared to AWS. Also the conclusion of this old benchmark is still partially true: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “Migrating from AWS to Hetzner”Submitted Dear American Website Owner as a story · 142 points
HN discussionI actually benchmarked this and wrote an article several years back, still very much applicable: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “Migrating from AWS to Hetzner”Submitted Here's why you should not buy a Drobo as a story · 134 points
HN discussionRegarding the bare metal issue, there are many more caveats, see for example: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things”Submitted X86 assembly encounter as a story · 24 points
HN discussionWell of course I won't use anything like that! I find it mind-boggling that people even consider giving a third party their bank account login+password. It's like saying "yes, I want to be robbed of all my money, please take these credentials and spread them forth to whichever leaked data pile they might end up in". My bank considers transactions done using login credentials to be final. There is no recourse if some…
Comment linking /enblog/spark-email-app-why-i-dont-use-it-anymore-2018-07-20
on “I didn't get paid, so I open-sourced my client’s project”Submitted HTML5, H.264 and Free Software: it's the wrong game as a story · 17 points
HN discussion> When determining what to use for development of my SaaS, I did a comparison of what you actually get from providers. The full article is at https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance- ... Your results (e.g. that z1d.xlarge with 4 vCPUs is only 10% slower than z1d.2xlarge with 8 vCPUs) shows that the "performance" you were testing was disk IO throughput (probably dominated by disk latency), not vCP…
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-
on “Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?”Submitted Clojure performance tuning notes as a story · 14 points
HN discussionWhen determining what to use for development of my SaaS, I did a comparison of what you actually get from providers. The full article is at https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-... My takeaways were that many cloud provider offerings make no sense whatsoever, and that Xeon processors are mostly great if you are a cloud provider and want to offer overbooked "vCPUs". I haven't tested those speci…
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?”Submitted Who's the sheep? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt's one of the reasons the so-called desktop CPUs are so popular for certain applications. [0] [0] https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “AMD server CPUs capture highest market share gains from Intel in 15 years”Submitted Check your hosting provider's spam reputation before you sign up as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI created a comparison myself, because I couldn't find one. It was for my specific workload, which is CPU-intensive, but could be useful for others, too. An important find was that what we are being sold are not "cores", but "vCPUs", which usually correspond to hyperthreads, on slow Xeons. Which means no performance to speak of if the machine is loaded, which it usually is. My conclusion was to rent physical servers…
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “How we got our AWS bill to around 2% of revenue”Submitted Experiments with parallel genetic programming in clojure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNot if you need any CPU performance to speak of. Given the misleading "vCPUs" that we are sold, I took some time to benchmark several major cloud providers and the results were… worrying: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-... BTW, I run my SaaS on real servers from Hetzner. I figured I won't need instant auto-scaling anyway, and if you provision with ansible it doesn't really matter if it's…
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “How we got our AWS bill to around 2% of revenue”Submitted Cloud server CPU performance comparison as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Even GCP VMs and EC2 instances are reasonably priced. Really? EC2 instances are waaay overpriced. If you need a specific machibe for a relatively short time, sure, you can pick up one from the vast choice of available configurations, but if you need on for long-running workloads, you'll be much better of picking up one from Hetzner, by an order of magnitude. For one of the many examples, see this 5-year old summar…
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?”Submitted Spark E-mail app: why I don't use it anymore as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe answer is "no, it doesn't". I've been running my SaaS first on a single server, then after getting product-market fit on several servers. These are bare-metal servers (Hetzner). I have no microservices, I don't deal with Kubernetes, but I do run a distributed database. These bare-metal servers are incredibly powerful compared to virtual machines offered by cloud providers (I actually measured several years back:…
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?”Submitted The cross-platform browser fallacy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOf of the good aspects of Hetzner that they also offer desktop CPUs which are often more powerful than the so-called enterprise CPUs (see https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-... ).
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “A Surprise AWS Bill”Submitted Cloud server CPU performance comparison (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat bit about fixed point is exremely interesting.. I found your blog post about the project you're (I think) referring to ( http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2009/12/4/x86-assembly-encount... ), but it doesn't mention the fixed point part. Not knowing too much about processor architecture, I don't understand how fixed point can be much faster, since floating point ops are implemented in hardware.. I presume you used i…
Comment linking /enblog/2009/12/4/x86-assembly-encounter.html
on “Don't use assembly unless you're an expert”Submitted Cloud server CPU performance comparison (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionInteresting! These look very good indeed. I will have to try them. The main point is that physical servers are much cheaper than VMs and provide significantly better performance as well (see my benchmarking and comparison: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-... ).
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?”Submitted Cloud server CPU performance comparison as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Provided their clients don't figure out what's going on As far as I can tell, very few people ask similar questions. Those who do, come to interesting conclusions: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
Comment linking /enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12
on “Why the American shoe disappeared and is hard to bring back (2019)”Submitted System perspective: channels do not necessarily decouple as a story · 1 points
HN discussion