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I was looking to swap out my 2x500gb HDD on my web server (just runs apache+php on centos minimal nothing else) with 2x120gb (samsung 840 pros I can find them for about $70 on sale each). But I was wondering if its worth the $140 investment. My server only uses about ~20gb space. So the space is not an issue on the 120gb. Will it increase my sites load time (im on a dedicated 1gbps port on premium bandwidth mix thats not fully utilized) due to the increase read speed?

arberb
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  • It might help under very heavy loads. But it sounds like your server is not very heavily loaded at all. – hookenz Sep 27 '13 at 21:39

2 Answers2

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If it is purely about performance, then you may find it more beneficial in your case to spend the money on more RAM (~16G) and allowing the page cache to save all static data read in from the webserver from disk to ram.

It would be a few orders of magnitude faster.

Matthew Ife
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  • THanks for you reply. Right now at the moment I don't use any sort of page caching method since my social network has lots of new content. I have about 1000 active online users and they use 6gb ram (i have 8gb, i can easily upgrade to 16gb or 32gb). Would it be more beneficial to enable it and set the cache time to a low amount (5 min or something)? Also if lets say my site grows to 5000 active online users would I have to disable page cache at that moment or should I decrease the amount to 1-2min? – arberb Sep 27 '13 at 21:48
  • Caching in this case is a 'permanent' feature of the O/S. It caches data from disk as files are being read. It never goes stale insomuch as all data in and out affects the pagecache. So in effect you have to do nothing but add more memory. – Matthew Ife Sep 27 '13 at 22:23
  • There's also the combination of adding more RAM, re-jiggering the spindle drives to ZFS, and using an SSD or two to juice up the ZFS Intent Log. [ZIL] – Sammitch Sep 27 '13 at 22:58
  • @Sammitch Putting the ZIL on a SSD (or even a dedicated, very fast spinning-rust HDD) helps only with synchronous writes. A L2ARC would help with reads once it's been primed if RAM is insufficient. – user Jul 10 '14 at 09:11
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Are you also running a database on the same server ? if you do and your website have a lot of read/write then the change to SSD can improve the performance. And like Mlfe said adding more ram and proper apache optimization can be a huge factor.

zertux
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  • I have a dedicated mysql server that has 8x250gb ssds on raid-10. This server is run separate from that – arberb Sep 27 '13 at 21:52