SSD make difference!
We’ve been hearing that SSD hard disks are new generation and therefor, all database intensive servers have to move to new SSD servers. We gave it a shot and we never regret it!
In hitsteps, we analyze thousands of hits per seconds. this hits then categorized and processed by a background processor, and archived somewhere along with millions of other hits!
Given searching a visitor or looking back into archive of a visitor is an essential feature of hitsteps, we always had to struggle with performance of database searches, specially when searching for some visitors who visited months ago.
MySQL databases need RAM to hold all indexes of data, they also need a fast disk in case data are not in RAM. so we did the test in a mirrored server:
Our search parameter was a simple query of “Searching for a visitor for who visited hitsteps dashboard who are from Canada since 6 months ago”
HDD server took 45 seconds to return query (almost near to timeout in most apache web server setups). SSD server took only 6 seconds to return query. Going to page number 2 in HDD took 15 seconds, in SSD just a wee 2 seconds.
It worth mentioning all other simple queries take less than 0.2 seconds in SSD servers and 0.5 in HDD servers.
Please do note that this times are closed source and relative to our script and codes. It might be different with other Applications, codes and scripts you might use in your server. RAM also play a major role here which is more appearance if your server is using HDD.
