Re: [9.4 CF] Free VMs for Reviewers & Testers

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 12:24 AM, Jesper Krogh <jesper(at)krogh(dot)cc> wrote:
>
> The really, really big ones are useful even for pushing limits, such
> as cr1.8xlarge, with 32 CPUs and 244GiB memory. Current spot instance
> price (the heavily discounted "can die at any time" one) is $0.343/hr.
> Otherwise, it's 3.500/hr.
>
>
> Just to keep in mind cpus are similar throttled:
>
> One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz
> 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. This is also the equivalent to an
> early-2006 1.7 GHz Xeon processor referenced in our original documentation.

This is only a statement of measurement (notably, it also is a metric
that is SMP-processor-count-oblivious), for lack of a more sensible
metric (certainly not clock cycles nor bogomips) in common use.

> Who knows what that does to memory bandwidth / context switches etc.

Virtualization adds complexity, that is true, but so does a new
version of Linux or comparing across microprocessors, motherboards, or
operating systems. I don't see a good reason to be off-put in the
common cases, especially since I can't think of another way to produce
such large machines on a short-term obligation basis.

The advantages are probably diminished (except for testing
virtualization overhead on common platforms) for smaller machines that
can be located sans-virtualization more routinely.