florian marending

01 Jan 2024

A brief comparison of Hetzner servers

ARM is a viable option

Hetzner has been my go to hosting provider for some time, thanks to their reliability and low cost. Some months ago they started offering Ampere-based ARM servers on their VPSs. They offer more cores and more RAM for the same money. It sounds very appealing to me to move away from x86 entirely, since my development machine is also ARM based (Macbook M1). But before I migrate my setup to ARM servers I wanted to run some basic benchmarks to see what I'm getting myself into.

Results

1248threadsarmx86armx86armx86armx86050,000100,000150,000200,000250,000→ events / second16 K33 K32 K66 K65 K134 K65 K268 K
Figure 1. sysbench CPU benchmark results
148threadsarmx86armx86armx86010,000,00020,000,00030,000,00040,000,00050,000,00060,000,00070,000,000→ number of events55 M45 M26 M61 M27 M73 M
Figure 2. sysbench memory benchmark results
1248threadsarmx86armx86armx86armx860100200300400500600→ MiB/s written232153355257611403622537
Figure 3. sysbench fileio benchmark results (--file-test-mode=seqwr)

Results are mixed but it seems like especially for compute heavy applications the price-to-performance is way better with the ARM servers.

Methodology

The plots show the results of these sysbench invocations:

sysbench cpu --threads=x run
sysbench memory --threads=x run
sysbench fileio --threads=x --file-test-mode=seqwr run

The instances under test are the CPX31 for x86 and the CAX31 for ARM. They have 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM respectively.