I am looking to upgrade to the RackShack service that will offer my users the greatest speed when browsing through my website. So far, I've had mixed results. One of my RaQ4 machines is lightning fast -- essentially the speed that I am looking for -- and the others are much slower. The slowest of all my machines is my AMD 1 gHz which I just recently upgraded to 1 GB of RAM thinking that the RAM was the speed bottleneck. The traffic to the Duron is roughly the same as the RaQ performing at much greater speeds.

It is my theory that the different machines are on different portions of the RackShack network, and the AMD box is on a portion of the network that is under a particularily heavy load most of the time. That is the only reason I can come up with for why one machine will respond slower than another when its hardware is so obviously superior.

My real question pertains to the new 10 mbps dedicated connections. Since I am looking for speed -- would I notice a difference by getting the dedicated bandwidth? Would that entire pipe literally be reserved for my traffic (i.e., would it eliminate the "different network" slowdown I described above?)

If I will see an increase in speed over my current systems I will definitely purchase a dedicated bandwidth machine immediately.

Can someone give me feedback on the situation?

Wow...I didn't know it's possible for different speeds to exist within the same cluster of servers other than due to the server configs themselves. How slow are you talking about with the AMD machines?

It is a noticable lag in request response time.

I initially believed it was the server configurations as well. However, the numbers say otherwise:

RaQ4i - 256 MB RAM
76 processes 0.10 load average

Runs quite fast. No problem.


Duron 1 gHz - 1 GB RAM
46 processes 0.03 load average

Time from get request to server response is quite slow. Actual sustained data throughput after the connection is established is good, however.


I thought I would get some feedback as to whether a dedicated 10 mbps pipe would improve the second machine's performance.

just wondering about that load average, how is that based on? Is 0.03 a big difference from 2.00 or 30.00?

Their 10mbps pipe offer is Cogent only (but with fallback to other providers, if and only if anything goes wrong). So, no, it would somewhat worsen the response a bit, if anything.

Could also be ethernet connections you might have a bad card. I am not sure on this but Raqs probally have a better card.