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Rackspace Cloud, or Amazon EC2, which is best? This is just a quick performance comparison using SysBench. The following products where tested.

Product

CPU

Memory

Disk

Price

EC2 Small Instance

1 virtual core

1,7GB

160GB

$0.085 per hour

Rackspace 256MB

4 virtual cores

256MB

10GB

$0.015 per hour

Rackspace 1024MB

4 virtual cores

1GB

40GB

$0.065 per hour

Servers where running Ubuntu 9.10 i386, tests where performed on two different occasions, average scores where used. Here’s the results, less is good.

Product

SysBench CPU

Sysbench Memory

Sysbench File I/O

EC2 Small Instance

29.7s

491.3s

28.6s

Rackspace 256MB

5.6s

219.1s

26.4s

Rackspace 1024MB

4.1s

196.1s

17.8s

The following commands where used to do the benching, interesting values was the total time to run the test.

sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=cpu run
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=memory run
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw prepare
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw run

Conclusion

According to SysBench, Rackspace Cloud is much faster then EC2 in general, and cheaper as well. EC2 however comes with more memory and disk.