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Performance of Joyent Cloud

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Performance of Joyent Cloud

When it comes to servers in the cloud, there is this 1 word that grabs all the attention, “Commodity”.

Joyent is no doubt a commodity cloud provider but with an icing on top. Like Amazon and other clouds,

Joyent offers the same basic machine options and standard distro choices. But there’s more to it. Along with

Linux and Windows VMs, the company builds custom machines with some unique operating systems and

calls them appliances. Hence they are significantly faster than other commodity servers while performing

standard tasks like retrieving data from a database or answering requests for basic Web pages.

This unique one-of-its kind operating system that Joyent boasts of is called SmartOS. When Sun merged

with Oracle, a bunch of engineers from its cloud server team Solaris came on board for Joyent. They

changed some code here and there from OpenSolaris project and thus gave birth to SmartOS. Solaris fans

can still enjoy the benefits of their fav OS like file system, ZFS and Zones to name a few. Joyent SmartOS

server embeddes all these features and some more like DTrace, a debugging tool that will notify you what's

slowing down your software.

Joyent has made sure there’s no virtualization layer in between its guest OS and the device drivers of host

machines. The virtualization technology is tightly integrated with SmartOS so that people are directly

connected to device drivers of the machine. There are also some cool neat tricks that Joyent's virtualization

tool offers. For example, you can resize your virtual machine without rebooting it, if your underlying

server has room to spare. The virtual machine can also use the extra capacity temporarily in burst mode.

Joyent’s machines perform better than others owing to the thinness of its virtualization layer, termed as

“bare metal performance”. This comes in handy when systems run on virtual machines like Java, PHP or

Node. To test the performance, a low end 512MB machine at both Joyent and Rackspace was created and a

number of DaCapo benchmarks for Java were run. SmartOS came with Java 1.6 installed while we had to

install OpenJDK 1.6 on CentOS built at Rackspace. Most of the benchmarks ran 2-3 times faster on Joyent

box. The Luindex benchmark that builds a Lucene index ran more than 3 times faster while Avrora

benchmark that simulates microcontrollers ran at the same speed on both the servers.

Benchmark Joyent Cloud Rackspace Cloud Delta

Tomcat 10579 26332 Joyent 2.5x faster

Avrora 16701 16527 Rackspace 1% faster

Sunflow 11647 21537 Joyent 1.8x faster

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Luindex 1390 4287 Joyent 3.1x faster

Lusearch 7509 14947 Joyent 2x faster

[Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/review-joyent-cloud-built-speed-207561?page=0,1]

Joyent does not rely on SmartOS only, but also offers some pre-loaded "appliances". As you click through

the options, you will see a number of machines with ready to run packages such as Node.js, Percona, Riak,

and MongoDB. You just have to push the button and get a machine with all the files in right places to start

running. However just pushing the button doesn’t do everything. For example, when you push the start

button for a Node box, you have to log in and do everything with the command line. The performance has

been rated as incredible, by folks running lightweight jobs in Javascript server. A basic Node appliance can

easily handle thousands of clients as it can cope up to the incoming requests with little overhead.

It does take some time to test your application and then tune it accordingly. The OS, level of disk access

and level of network access can affect the server speeds dramatically. What is good for one application may

not benefit another. The same basic box with same specs can perform better or worse depending on how it

interacts with the hypervisor. However the amount of RAM, number of CPUs and amount of disk space

can't capture the effect of using SmartOS as virtualization layer.

Joyent is open source and does the hosting and provisioning of SmartOS. In case you want to move your

servers from the Joyent Cloud, you can download SmartOS and Node.js and the company will create a

"private cloud" for you in its data center. Joyent Cloud offers all standard distros at 15 to 25% cheaper

prices than Amazon Web Services.

Joyent has worked extensively to streamline the connection between incoming HTTP request and bare

metal. All that stands in between are Node and SmartOS and both can be unbelievably efficient in the right

hands. Joyent offers a different kind of commodity other than IaaS cloud providers. If you want to process

lots of basic requests at the HTTP processing level, then you can opt for a simple stack like Node.js

appliance. On the other hand, if you are looking out for a cleanly engineered machine built on more secure

and well-engineered operating systems, SmartOS is the best option. Joyent is trading its machine but it’s

appliances are engineered to deliver Web pages and database storage as a service that’s best and unique.

Exelanz has been associated with Joyent since the time it deployed and moved some of its enterprise

applications from its private data centres to public clouds. Being strategic partner with Joyent, the

combination of both our engineering team experience, makes us one of the most efficient cloud

implementation consultants. This in turn has loaded us with the insights and intricacies of using Joyent

services to the optimum.

Contact Us:

103 Patroon Drive, Albany, NY 12084

Email: joyent@exelanz.com, Phone: (860) 677-8883, Skype: dasanshuman