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amazon-web-servicesoptimizationamazon-ec2diskamazon-ebs

save on cost when using Amazon EBS


Seeing that Amazon has priced the usage of EBS as:

$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage; $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests

Even though the value is in millions, I/O request add up pretty quickly ... I was wondering if there are any best practices for reducing I/O requests out there.
E.g. Use an instance with more than enough RAM required for your app.. Tweak some OS level parameters.. dont do a 'sync' every couple of minutes :) .... etc.


Solution

  • So the general advice about avoiding premature *micro*optimizations should probably apply here. Think first about making sure you are using the PaaS architecture appropriately, and tweak parameters once you have data. Repost a more specific question (as gareth said).

    But I do have one specific optimization, since you asked: add a ramdisk to your linux machines, so that temporary files don't touch storage:

    echo "none /tmp/ tmpfs defaults 0 0" >>/etc/fstab
    

    and use vmstat -Sm 5 to watch how much IO is being done.