Re: [Monotone-devel] Server broken

[Ethan Blanton]

Jack Lloyd spake unto us the following wisdom:
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 11:51:19AM -0400, John Bailey wrote:
> > Virtual machines, especially those provided by OpenVZ and Virtuozzo,
> > are not the greatest things in the world--the seller can overcommit
> > the physical hosts or the hosts can be under-powered, and any one
> > virtual machine can flood disk I/O out to the point that it kills I/O
> > performance for other VM's and the other VM's can never tell why.
> > These factors result in the VM being unacceptably slow, especially in
> > disk I/O--this makes IMAP extremely slow to respond and can make even
> > simple shell work unbearably slow.  I've seen this particular problem
> > on every Virtuozzo or OpenVZ VM I've ever had access to.
> 
> Really this just depends on the provider, though. I've been using an
> OpenVZ instance as my web/mail/shell server for ~3 years and it's been
> great for me. (The provider I'm with is a bit pricier than most, OTOH
> - though still way cheaper than a dedicated box).

It should probably be clarified that John's experience includes
serving monotone, specifically.  Pidgin and its related projects have
had monotone on a number of virtual servers from varying providers
over the years, and our experiences have been Really Bad.  Monotone is
extremely demanding of I/O in a way which virtual hosts seem to have a
lot of trouble with.

Of course, proper provisioning *will* go a long way toward fixing this
problem.

Ethan

-- 
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws [that have no remedy
for evils].  They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor
determined to commit crimes.
                -- Cesare Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishments", 1764

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