One $10 server or two $5 servers?

Posted on June 13, 2013

Hi everyone,

I was wondering what is the fastest setup for a typical LAMP (or LANMP) application on DO. I’m rather underwhelmed by the performance of my Drupal (Pressflow) site running on Nginx on DO. I suspect it might be because of poor DB performance. Would I gain anything by using two $5 servers instead of my current single $10 server? That way I could distribute Nginx + PHP on one VPS and MariaDB on the other one.

Thanks for your help!

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upgrade to two cpu’s

Turn cache on 2. Inspect your slow-query.log and make proper indexing in DB If you don’t have proper indexing the HDD I/O slows down your site. If you migrate DB to another machine it will have minimal effect depending on how I/O heavy is your code, because the HDD is the same. How to check if I/O is the problem: 1. A lot of records in slow-query.log most of them SELECTs 2. Low CPU usage and High load averages (you can use newrelic.com for monitoring)