What's excessive disk IO?

May 9, 2017 6.6k views
Storage
legerdemain
By:
legerdemain

I’m kinda new to DO. I have a project that will involve writing a very large number of small files. The smallest droplet outperforms my own hardware, so I’d like to use that with an attached volume. I’m single-threaded right now, and a small test run suggests that I’m generating a sustained 55-60MB/s write. I can tolerate a slower write. My hardware seems to complete the workload at about half the speed of a droplet.

I’m not seeing any separate IOPS charges in the billing data. I don’t see an official limit. Every question I can find on this topic is old.

Before I go any further, is it generally safe for me to have an application that writes like this for a longer period?

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer
jtittle1 May 9, 2017

@legerdemain

Although broad, excessive I/O would be defined as anything that causes performance to degrade on the host node (i.e. the main server), thus affecting other users’ Droplets.

@ryanpg may be able to shed a little more light on this, or as another option, perhaps fire off a ticket to the support team and ask them directly.

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  • hansen May 9, 2017

    @jtittle It’s @ryanpq (not @ryanpg), who’s Community Manager, but I think Darian might be better, since he’s Platform Advocate.

    @dwilkin What’s the “rules” of excessive IOPS. Can you help with this question or should the OP create a ticket?

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    • dwilkin May 9, 2017

      @hansen happy to help here!

      @legerdemain There’s no hard limit to your IOPS on our systems, generally you’re good to use as much as you can get. There is always the caveat that if your usage starts to negatively impact other users on the platform then we may reach out to ask what’s going on, but we only usually see that becoming a problem with CPU and RAM usage, not IOPS. Does that answer your questions?

      I’d also like to note that your IOPS will be slower on a block storage volume than it will be on your Droplet’s primary storage, as block storage is network storage.

      Regards,
      Darian
      Platform Support Advocate

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    • jtittle1 May 9, 2017

      @hansen - Looks like I was typing too fast on that one ;-).

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