Hey hey dear people, my first post here.
I’ve been given the order to look for a new dedicated server to host our website and my knowledge of server gear is limited.
I need some experts
This is the situation:
Right now we have a heavily modified webshop running Magento 2 and it’s god awful slow (checkout takes 5 minutes of loading screens). Turns out we’ve been running on a 2xE5620 system and our CPU’s have been on 100% load for the past 2 months. We are paying over $500 a month for this.
I was put on this job last week and now have the task to find something better. The server provider offered to “upgrade” us to a dual ten core system and after many many request they finally specified it as a dual e-2660 v3 system. Brand new they said, specially built for us, $1000 a month. Some quick googling leads me to question this statement as e-2660v3 are no longer sold nor manufactured (I think).
Needless to say, I’m looking at other options now and would love your opinion.
Now I can build you a gaming rig any day of the week, but for server hardware the best I can do is look up the benchmarks from PassMark.
I’ve received these offers from a reputable server provider:
System1 - Xeon Gold 6132 - 96GB DDR4 2666 - 4x 1.92 SATA SSD in RAID 10
System2 - AMD Epyc 7451 - 128GB DDR4 2400 - 2x 1.92 NVME RAID
Prices are about half of what our current provider is willing to build for us.
My question: Am I even looking in the right direction here for running a heavy Magento 2 webshop on? (Is it overkill or underpowered)
Optional: Anything an experienced server handler can give me as general advice?
Any help is much appreciate.
Hope you all have a happy early Devember.
Do you know anything beyond cpu loads being 100%? What are your disk writes?
It might also be worth looking into WHY you’re running at 100% load (is it truely the result of just maxing out concurrent users, etc.) or is something else going on? Because presumably you have some form of down time where you’re not experiencing high user counts. Perhaps there are other software issues as well causing the CPU utilization and you’re trying to put out a grease fire with water?
Yeah, first thing to check is if someone didn’t got into your machine and mining bitcoins for example.
Your webshop might be modified, but it might carry security holes along from original software.
Besides, I don’t want to pry, but do you really have so much movement in your business, like selling hundreds products a minute?
If yes and load is from legit customers, then without more data I would think IOPS is more important than CPU, so NVME option probably better (in raid1/zfs mirror of course, and depending on concrete Pcie NVME hardware). Also more cores doesn’t hurt, if you don’t care about power then Epyc seems tad better.
But in this case also… why wont you hire admin who knows all this stuff, if your whole business depends on it…
Yeah there’s a combination of security exploits that have happened + weird configuration settings that if changed will mess with CPU usage. If you disable cache I’m pretty sure the CPU just goes complete 100% cpu usage.
It would not be surprising if this was a software issue. Hardware shouldn’t be where you start on figure out what is wrong. If you aren’t just confident that you can “figure it out” but rather that you’re working from past experience then 1.) you’re throwing money into the wind on hosting costs and 2.) you’re putting your customer information at risk!
Find someone that proven past experience to help you clean things up. And regardless switch to a new service provider as the one you’re with seems kind of sketchy to say that they’re putting you on a “brand new” e-2660 (assuming e5-2660 from 8 years ago?).
Long term we are indeed looking to hire a system admin.
As far as I understand this system was running fine on Magento 1, but since we were forced to update to Magento 2 our poor old server boi could no longer carry the workload.
Our current server is managed by the server provider, hence we didn’t really need an administrator.
I hope to god whoever is mining bitcoin is making a good buck
Erm, you would be hard pressed in server world to find project in which second iteration was less efficient than the first one. Its not MS Office… Wait a minute, this is Adobe soft? Well sh… Maybe its running on flash??? There’s your problem
But seriously, seems more like “upgrade” caused some bug that is stressing system without reason. But without more data its guessing game.
Yeah - second that. Nothing I’m hearing is sounding like upgrading server will fix the issue. In particular the 100% cpu sounds like it HAS to be some form of software issue.
And based on the fact that your current provider didn’t immediately say that and instead suggested to upgrade to hardware to fix the issue… it sounds like you’re either being hustled OR don’t ACTUALLY have a server admin and instead some web service provider equivalant of a script kiddie.
Thanks guys
I will definitely ask them to check if caches are enabled, and I can pretty much guarantee we are being hustled Not much I can do about that on the short term though.
You need someone to debug Magento and make it work, hardware is not your problem, hire a decent admin permanently.
Hardware wise, a web shop website generally shouldn’t require more than a raspberry pi worth of compute power.
e.g. you have some static pages and content you’re serving over https, you have some forms, you have some user sessions you can keep in ram, let’s say memcached or redis, because you can make it persistent/easy to restart the app webserver, you have inventory, offers and orders/baskets, orders can go through a few flows. Pretty sure a raspberry pi could deal with 20 people browsing and once in a while someone pushing their basket through the checkout flow… but, it’s a horrible idea for your business to rely on a raspberry pi for this, or any individual machine.
That’s why you need an admin (or a cheap web developer guy, someone who can do a bit of python and a bit of database work)
I agree with the sentiment although for Magento in particular certainly isn’t super lightweight so definitely would need slightly better hardware than a raspberry pi to run in production.
But it just looks like total overkill with what you’re looking at hardware wise. This is definitely a software issue first and foremost. I’m incredibly skeptical you even need the 500 a month server!
Be sure to find someone you truly trust to manage the admin side of your store and get things cleaned up. Look for proven experience managing other Magento stores and wait on the hardware decisions until you consult with that individual as once they figure out your usage pattern they’ll be far more equipped to help you with capacity planning than a shot in the dark. Overbuying hardware won’t fix the software issues but it will cost you extra $ for as long as you’re in business!
