Blender Artists server upgrade plans - some help needed

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1

Hey everyone!

Blender Artists is going to run out of disk space in 5-6 weeks or so, and I have started thinking about upgrade options. So far, I have added additional space to this server, but at the current market prices, I think we could get more CPU, memory and storage at the same price.

If you know your way around server hardware, I could use some guidance with picking a good configuration that can take us through the next 3 years.

Our current configuration is:

  • CPUIntel Xeon E5-1650V2
  • HDD2x SSD SATA 240 GB Datacenter
  • RAM4x RAM 16384 MB DDR3 ECC reg.
  • 1 x 500 GB SATA SSD (non-raid)
  • Hetzner CPU-B Benchmark: 8977
  • Prize about EUR 70/month

There’s still about 115GB free on the non-raid drive that I use for data that can be regenerated (like resized images etc).

What I’m thinking of getting is an EX52-NVMe or EX62-NVMe as listed here.

These machines have:

  • 2x 1TB NVMe SSD (so we can have everything in RAID)
  • 128GB Ram (DDR4, not ECC - does that matter?)
  • CPU-B benchmarks of 15000 and 20000, respectively.

What do you think? Is this a sensible upgrade, or can you perhaps find another server at Hetzner that would do the job better at roughly the same price?

Thanks!

2

How much load does the SSD’s experience? You might not need that transfer rate. Maybe you can get away with high storage enterprise hdd’s, they are extremely cheap on a per gb basis, and very reliable

3

I don’t have absolute numbers, mainly because I’m not sure how to measure that :slight_smile: But the database is handling a LOT of requests. Almost the entire DB is cached in memory though, so all read operations should not result in disk transfer.

4

hmm, its been some years since i’ve dealt with servers, but back then at least, the rule of thumb was at least to not use ssd unless you actually max out your drives, im curious if times have changed. ill keep an eye on this thread as im curious where it goes :stuck_out_tongue:

5

To close the loop on this, I decided to upgrade harddisk space once more instead of taking the fare more difficult path of doing a full server migration. We should be good for another 2 years now (I hope :sweat_smile: )