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Writer's pictureArchana Barve

GCP Cloud Performance: Time-Based Score Variations

Updated: Nov 13


Why time matters

In May 2022, one of our customers asked us to tune Elasticsearch with Esrally for cloud providers. We started with trying multiple combinations of manual runs on all cloud providers. We were collecting scaling runs with 2/4/8/16 cores. In the above data collection, we could not see the proportionate scores. Hence, we decided to experiment with running the Elasticsearch ESRally benchmark throughout the day.

As Esrally doesn’t run for a particular duration, we carried out the runs 50 times so that it will span a whole day. And here is what we saw!


Used configurations are:


Cloud configurations

Altra  - t2a-standard-16
Intel Icelake - n2d-standard-16
Milan - c2d-standard-16

Elasticsearch 8.4.1 
Esrally 2.6.0

Server  

  Altra

  Intel Icelake. 

  Milan

Client

  Altra

  Altra

  Altra


Benchmarks

Altra Results Variance

Variation is observed according to time of day.

AMD is the best where SD is lowest.

But Intel and Altra show large standard deviations.


Unveiling the time vs. performance results

NGINX-wrk benchmark also shows such behaviour on GCP.

NGINX- wrk runs are carried out 1440 times keeping each run ‘s duration 60 seconds.


Network Benchmark-NGINX-wrk story

Altra and AMD EPYC


Variation in p95 latency is observed through the time of day.

Both Intel and Altra show 10% standard deviation in p95 latency numbers.

 

Do consider Time-based Score Variations before running network applications:


Time based score variation conclusion

  1. Time of day does affect latency since neighboring VMs might be busy or idle depending on the time of day. 

  2. Run-to-run variation is a function of time of day. Eventually, we were able to help the customer figure out where the performance difference was coming from. To ensure a specific output through the day the scaling of VM has been suggested.



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