Performance difference between NYC1 and NYC3 or "volumes" performance?

Hi @mmb

I don’t have an answer, since most of us in here don’t work for DO, but let’s see if Darian (the platform advocate of DO) can give us an answer.

I would speculate that block storage is a little slower, since it’s network based and I would guess droplet storage is physical on each hypervisor. And depending on who your neighbors are, then there could be a speed difference, but I don’t know if there is any hardware difference.

@dwilkin Hi Darian, can you help answering this? 1) Is block storage slower the droplet storage. 2) Is there droplet HW difference between NYC3 and NYC1.

@mmb I noticed the exact same thing when trying to use DO block storage as a filesystem for databases.

I haven’t made a scientific test but compared the performance in a real world application and noticed that using block storage is 10 times slower than using the droplets internal storage.

Creating Database, User, Password, Flushing privileges and Importing a 44KB mysql dump with attached block storage:

Execution time : 4.2606270313263 seconds
Execution time : 4.2530460357666 seconds
Execution time : 4.1727960109711 seconds
Execution time : 4.3930230140686 seconds

Doing the exact same thing directly on the Droplet:

Execution time : 0.58489298820496 seconds
Execution time : 0.44117593765259 seconds
Execution time : 0.5139148235321 seconds
Execution time : 0.4229941368103 seconds

So this basically rules out using DO block storage for anything other than backups or static files. Let me know if you found another solution,