Vultr High Frequency CPU Server Benchmarked

Vultr recently released a whole new product line to go along with their brand new website and logo. The new product line is high frequency CPU (think 3.6ghz and higher), backed by NVMe storage. Obviously, we had to take it for a spin to see if it lives up to the hype. Here is the official announcement.

It’s hard to believe Vultr was introduced way back in February 2014. Since then, we’ve deployed over 23 million instances in 16 data centers and the Vultr team has worked hard to make worldwide infrastructure management easy for all users - ranging from small developers to large enterprises. Today, we are delighted to reveal our brand new high frequency compute lineup and our new design for Vultr.com!

Introducing the new Vultr.com logo!

While we loved the style of the previous logo, our team was ready for a fresh new look that accurately depicts the enterprise platform Vultr is today. After going back and forth through many iterations, our design team settled on a refreshed look that is more distinctive and easily recognizable in both print and digital formats. We hope you love the updated look as much as we do! Our updated brand assets page makes multiple versions of the updated logo available for download.

More Powerful Compute

We are also excited to share the latest product in our cloud lineup - high frequency compute! Powered by 3+ Ghz processors and blazing fast NVME storage, this newest plan is the highest performance hardware architecture Vultr has ever offered. High Frequency compute powers the most demanding workloads with storage and processing benchmarks that exceed standard compute by up to 40%!

High Frequency compute is initially available in New Jersey and will be available worldwide later this summer! Read more about high frequency compute or deploy an instance today!

On with the benchmarks, starting with our usual bench.sh script. As of this writing, the high frequncy servers are only available in the New York datacenter. We fired up the 1GB server, that comes with 1vCPU and 32GB of NVMe storage. As you can see from the bench.sh runs below, the server we were issued is clocked at 3.8ghz, which is nothing to sneeze at. The disk performs as expected for NVMe based storage, with the averages being well into the 900MB/sec

Run 1.

CPU model : Virtual CPU 6db7dc0e7704
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 3792.000 MHz
Total size of Disk : 32.0 GB (1.9 GB Used)
Total amount of Mem : 992 MB (38 MB Used)
Total amount of Swap : 0 MB (0 MB Used)
System uptime : 0 days, 0 hour 7 min
Load average : 0.02, 0.02, 0.00
OS : Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
Arch : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel : 4.4.0-148-generic

I/O speed(1st run) : 782 MB/s
I/O speed(2nd run) : 998 MB/s
I/O speed(3rd run) : 1.0 GB/s
Average I/O speed : 934.7 MB/s

Node Name IPv4 address Download Speed
CacheFly 205.234.175.175 85.2MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP 106.187.96.148 13.1MB/s
Linode, Singapore, SG 139.162.23.4 9.24MB/s
Linode, London, UK 176.58.107.39 29.3MB/s
Linode, Frankfurt, DE 139.162.130.8 25.3MB/s
Linode, Fremont, CA 50.116.14.9 30.0MB/s
Softlayer, Dallas, TX 173.192.68.18 33.8MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA 67.228.112.250 26.4MB/s
Softlayer, Frankfurt, DE 159.122.69.4 10.3MB/s
Softlayer, Singapore, SG 119.81.28.170 6.78MB/s
Softlayer, HongKong, CN 119.81.130.170 7.49MB/s

Run 2

CPU model : Virtual CPU 6db7dc0e7704
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 3792.000 MHz
Total size of Disk : 32.0 GB (2.0 GB Used)
Total amount of Mem : 992 MB (38 MB Used)
Total amount of Swap : 0 MB (0 MB Used)
System uptime : 0 days, 0 hour 13 min
Load average : 0.00, 0.04, 0.00
OS : Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
Arch : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel : 4.4.0-148-genericI/O speed(1st run) : 772 MB/s
I/O speed(2nd run) : 1.0 GB/s
I/O speed(3rd run) : 1.0 GB/s
Average I/O speed : 940.0 MB/sNode Name IPv4 address Download Speed
CacheFly 205.234.175.175 119MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP 106.187.96.148 12.7MB/s
Linode, Singapore, SG 139.162.23.4 8.93MB/s
Linode, London, UK 176.58.107.39 28.0MB/s
Linode, Frankfurt, DE 139.162.130.8 26.1MB/s
Linode, Fremont, CA 50.116.14.9 25.2MB/s
Softlayer, Dallas, TX 173.192.68.18 35.3MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA 67.228.112.250 27.2MB/s
Softlayer, Frankfurt, DE 159.122.69.4 7.60MB/s
Softlayer, Singapore, SG 119.81.28.170 6.73MB/s
Softlayer, HongKong, CN 119.81.130.170 7.85MB/s

Run 3

CPU model : Virtual CPU 6db7dc0e7704
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 3792.000 MHz
Total size of Disk : 32.0 GB (2.0 GB Used)
Total amount of Mem : 992 MB (38 MB Used)
Total amount of Swap : 0 MB (0 MB Used)
System uptime : 0 days, 0 hour 15 min
Load average : 0.04, 0.04, 0.00
OS : Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS
Arch : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel : 4.4.0-148-genericI/O speed(1st run) : 773 MB/s
I/O speed(2nd run) : 1.1 GB/s
I/O speed(3rd run) : 1.0 GB/s
Average I/O speed : 974.5 MB/sNode Name IPv4 address Download Speed
CacheFly 205.234.175.175 111MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP 106.187.96.148 13.2MB/s
Linode, Singapore, SG 139.162.23.4 8.96MB/s
Linode, London, UK 176.58.107.39 33.0MB/s
Linode, Frankfurt, DE 139.162.130.8 26.7MB/s
Linode, Fremont, CA 50.116.14.9 31.9MB/s
Softlayer, Dallas, TX 173.192.68.18 36.0MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA 67.228.112.250 23.9MB/s
Softlayer, Frankfurt, DE 159.122.69.4 8.16MB/s
Softlayer, Singapore, SG 119.81.28.170 7.04MB/s
Softlayer, HongKong, CN 119.81.130.170 7.78MB/s

Speedtest-cli test.

These tests do not seem to be very valid for this particular VPS, as the speedtest node is actually hosted by Vultr, so the numbers are whacky.

root@vultr:/tmp/speedtest-cli-master# speedtest-cli --share
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Testing from Choopa, LLC (45.77.221.62)…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Selecting best server based on ping…
Hosted by Vultr (Matawan, NJ) [24.71 km]: 1.118 ms
Testing download speed…
Download: 8175.50 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed…
Upload: 5845.81 Mbit/s
Share results: Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test
root@vultr:/tmp/speedtest-cli-master# speedtest-cli --share
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Testing from Choopa, LLC (45.77.221.62)…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Selecting best server based on ping…
Hosted by Vultr (Matawan, NJ) [24.71 km]: 0.871 ms
Testing download speed…
Download: 7580.49 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed…
Upload: 5019.10 Mbit/s
Share results: Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test
root@vultr:/tmp/speedtest-cli-master# speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Testing from Choopa, LLC (45.77.221.62)…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Selecting best server based on ping…
Hosted by Vultr (Matawan, NJ) [24.71 km]: 0.874 ms
Testing download speed…
Download: 7662.64 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed…
Upload: 6986.18 Mbit/s
root@vultr:/tmp/speedtest-cli-master# speedtest-cli --share
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Testing from Choopa, LLC (45.77.221.62)…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Selecting best server based on ping…
Hosted by Vultr (Matawan, NJ) [24.71 km]: 0.839 ms
Testing download speed…
Download: 7660.60 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed…
Upload: 5848.24 Mbit/s

Now onto our beloved Geekbench benchmark.

QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996)Result InformationSystem InformationSingle-Core PerformanceMulti-Core Performance

Conclusions - with this VPS being only $1 more expensive than the $5 1Gb Digital Ocean droplet that we benchmarked here, to me it is a no brainer to spend the extra buck, to about %50 more performance from the CPU, and close to triple the performance on the disk.