Benchmarking OVH VPS + Dedicated Ryzen + Dedicated Ryzen on Proxmox VM

Table Of Contents

Instances tested
Testing Notes
OVH Elite VPS 2023
OVH Dedicated Server Advanced LE
OVH Dedicated Ryzen + Proxmox VM Test Results
- PerformanceTest Result (cpubenchmark.net)
Final Thoughts
Changelog

Instances tested

The test results below are for the following.

OVH Elite VPS 2023

Offered on 01/03/2023
8 Cores, 16GB of memory and 320GB of storage on the node os-bhs2
- Intel Core (Haswell, no TSX) (8) @ 2.399996GHz
- kvm on OpenStack Nova 19.3.2
- Network Interface: Virtualized, no speed provided due to virtio-pci driver.

OVH Elite VPS 2020 (Not tested, just for comparison)

Offered on 01/01/2020
4 Cores, 8GB of memory and 160G of storage on the node os-bhs6
- Intel Core (Haswell, no TSX) (4) @ 2.399996GHz
- kvm on OpenStack Nova 14.1.1
- Network Interface: Virtualized, no speed provided due to virtio-pci driver.

OVH Dedicated Server Advanced LE

Offered on 01/03/2022
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X – 6c/12t – 3.7 GHz/4.6 GHz processor, 16GB memory, and 2x960GB NVMe disks
- ASRockRack X470D4U2-2T motherboard.
- Network Interface (ethtool enp1s0f0 | grep -i speed): Speed: 10000Mb/s
- Public bandwidth: 1 Gbps
- Private bandwidth: 1 Gbps unmetered

OVH Dedicated Server Advanced LE Virtual Machine Instance

Proxmox VM Guest using KVM
4 cores, 8GB of memory and 120GB of storage.

Testing Notes

Getting Interface Link Speed

You want to know what the interface link speed of your instance is; this is possible with dedicated servers/baremetal. But not with virtualized guest/instances due to the use of a virtual network interface.

For dedicated servers/bare metal you can run ethtool to get the network interface speed. You’ll of course need the interface name

❯ ethtool enp1s0f0 | grep -i speed
        Speed: 10000Mb/s

Speed Tests

Higher speeds than network connection link speed with iperf3

You might notice that the OVH VPS iperf3 test is above (2000Mbps) than the operating system’s actual connection (1000Mbps). Trying to chase this down with iperf3, disabling all kinds of optimizations on the OS.

The likely culprit is that the instance/guest is deployed onto a node/host with a single 10G or multiple 1G connections. Essentially meaning there is more network capacity than 1000Mbps available.

The virtio-pci driver simply dumps network requests onto the bus to be dealt with, and there is no physical device on the instance/guest; therefore, there is no physical limit until the network traffic hits the physical network device. You can read more about it here. There is a good explanation of this on a ServerFault thread.

https://serverfault.com/questions/738840/get-link-speed-of-an-virtio-net-network-adapter

However, when looking at the interface used on both the OVH VPS and OVH Dedicated server using iftop or cmb both are interface bandwidth monitoring tools. Neither interface had surpassed the 1Gb/s interface limit.

Ookla Linux CLI versus speedtest-cli

There were two tests you could use via the CLI for speedtest.net.

speedtest-cli from Github – https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli
Ookla linux cli – https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

I don’t know the difference; they both provide similar functionality.

Ookla speedtest.net Inaccurate

As the title says, the Ookla speedtest.net test is ~~inaccurate; there were multiple instances where the OVH Dedicated Server could get an above 1Gb/s download speed, sometimes 9Gb/s, as you can see below.~~

I was incorrect in my findings with Ookla speedtest.net being inaccurate; why? Google Search, when entering in 9177Mbps to GB/s, Google doesn’t check the case of letters. It sees 9177mbps to gb/s, which would mean “bits” and not bytes.

As you can see below, these tests are accurate.

Beanfield Metroconnect – Toronto, ON (id: 3025) – Download 9177.18 Mbps

9177.18 Mbits/s (bits) = 1147 MBytes/s (bytes) = 8.9620 Gbit/s (bits) = 1.1202 GBytes/s (bytes)

TELUS – Toronto, ON (id: 3575) – Download – 9368.57 Mbps

9413.97 Mbits/s (bits) = 1176 MBytes/s (bytes) = 9.1933 Gbit/s (bits) = 1.1491 GBytes/s (bytes)

Here’s another example, but from the command line, the Mbps is bits, and GB is bits.

As you can see, if you change the units of the speed test from the default to -u GB/s it doesn’t add up to the 9382.65 Mbps shown with the default units. If you do the conversion 9382.65 Mbps = 9.38265 GB/s, which is nine times the speed as the test using the GB/s units. I reached out to Ookla support.

~~At this point, I’m going crazy because I thought I knew how to convert speeds. But now I’m second-guessing myself.~~

I could have figured this out by just doing the math, and thinking about the link speeds. Bits and Bytes will bit you in the butt! 🙂

OVH Elite VPS 2023

Cost: $62.70/month USD (No commitment)

Hardware

OVH VPS vps2020-elite-8-16-320 os-bhs2
Intel Core (Haswell, no TSX) 2399 MHz (8 cores)
Network Interface: 1G advertised, 1000 Ethernet via ip addr
Location: Beauharnois, Quebec, Canada, in datacenter BHS2.

CPU Test Results

PerformanceTest Result (cpubenchmark.net):

https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V10/display.php?id=502920511794
CPU Mark: 6728
Single Thread: 1365

Geekbench (browser.geekbench.com)

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19455230
Single-Core: 556
Muti-Core: 2985

Network Test Results

The location of this server is Beauharnois, Quebec, Canada in OVH’s Beauharnois (BHS2) Canada datacenter.
The network interface is 1G

Speedtest.net

Toronto, Rogers Wireless (Toronto, ON, Canada) [3.18 km](46759)

./speedtest-cli –server 46759
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14204199714.png

Fibrenoire Internet (Montréal, QC, Canada) [504.47 km] (911)

./speedtest-cli –server 911
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14212943059.png

Rogers (Etobicoke, ON, Canada) [11.47 km]

./speedtest-cli –server 46144
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14204222171.png

iperf3 Test

Used the list at https://github.com/R0GGER/public-iperf3-servers
New York – iperf3 -c nyc.speedtest.clouvider.net -p 5200-5209 – (Test Server is Listed as having a 10Gbit/s Connection)
Availabe as IPv6, resolving to IPv4, nyc.speedtest.clouvider.net = 94.154.159.137

Download Test IPv4 – OVH VPS

Upload Test IPv4 – OVH VPS

Download Test IPv6 – OVH VPS

Upload Test IPv6 – OVH VPS