VPS service and program power usage???

[Dapperdan]

Whats the best way to figure out the power usage of a program? My company is in the testing phase of a custom auto trading program to be used on a VPS. It's a small program, 3mb install file and when looked at properties under task manager it says the size is 700KB. Under processes it is saying it's using about 27-30K use of memory. I would like to know if it's possible to find out any other info that might be helpful in figuring out what VPS service we should be looking into.

The links below are for 2 companies that specialize in the specific service for our industry, trading. Both companies are in the same building in downtown Chicago and from what I can gather would provide the same speeds into the exchange. The price difference though is a matter of over 20 grand difference. The first company we are testing out their basic system for 60 bucks a month, they offer a week free trial. So far everything is running smooth and the speeds are what we expected. The second company is a bit older, has better reviews over all but runs 100 bucks a month. With all of our 50+ traders potentially using this, it could potentially cost the company 25 grand more a year for the potentially same service.

I guess Im trying to figure out with such a small foot print of a program, that we currently are looking to use, would there be a benefit of using a more powerful system that the second company uses as their base system? We might consider adding more programs later down the road but for now, it's just one basic program for our use.


http://www.speedytradingservers.com/?page_id=703
(1 GB Ram, 1 Xeon core, 50GB disk, 1000 mb/s) 60$ a month

http://steadfast.net/services/basicmanaged.dedicatedservers.php
(Dual Core Atom, Atom D525 1.8Ghz, 500 GB, 4 GB) 100$ a month

 

[athlon1.2]

Personally I think you are better off getting at least 2 redundant machines be they dedicated servers or colocation.

It seems like one is a dedicated machine and the other is a VPS.

 

[Dapperdan]

Whats the advantage of a dedicated over a VPS?

 

[shnelson]

Nothing really. Other than a VPS has the ability to run on a clustered set of hosts (think high-availability here). Whereas dedicated/physical is going to give you a definitive single point of failure. Both environments will give you the resources promised - but in a VPS you could be limited by a resource pool with reduced shares. This is something that will vary between hosting providers, and a good idea to get these details up front.

Also, do you have the need to scale? A dedicated box needs new hardware to scale. A VPS requires a ticket with your provider to increase resources. Both will require brief downtime.

In my opinion, both of those are priced high, windows licensing likely the culprit. Your app is extremely light weight, do you have any estimation of the bandwidth requirements or growth? Have you tested the app under a simulated load? Does it require a windows OS? It might run light under minimal load, but what's it look like with a dozen or more concurrent users?


Don't be afraid to venture outside of specialized hosting providers, unless they have unique knowledge around your app and can provide that additional support.

Companies like Rackspace are worth looking into here.