By applying a few tweaks, you can boost the performance of your VPS.
These tweaks are only required when you do a manual installation. All OS templates have these tweaks build in, so no action is required.
Important tweaks for all Operating Systems:
1) Use the correct partition alignment. We use modern 4K sector drives in all our SATA, SSD and NVMe VPS nodes. When your partition layout is based on the old MBR 512b sector style, you can loose up to 25 times! of disk I/O performance. That's a huge difference and will result a slow VPS, but also extra I/O load on our VPS nodes. If you partition layout is based on the 4K sector size, your first partition should start at sectory 2048 (or any other value that you can divide by 8).
Modern OSes will usually take care of proper partition alignment.
More interesting information regarding this can be found on the link below:
http://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Partition_Alignment
For Linux OSes with the VirtIO disk driver:
echo 0 > /sys/block/vda/queue/rotational
echo 0 > /sys/block/vda/queue/rq_affinity
echo noop > /sys/block/vda/queue/scheduler
echo "echo 0 > /sys/block/vda/queue/rotational" >> /etc/rc.local
echo "echo 0 > /sys/block/vda/queue/rq_affinity" >> /etc/rc.local
echo "echo noop > /sys/block/vda/queue/scheduler" >> /etc/rc.local
echo 'vm.swappiness = 5' >> /etc/sysctl.conf
echo 'vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50' >> /etc/sysctl.conf
On VPSes with 1GB+ memory, you can consider to set the value "vm.swappiness" to 0 instead of 5. This will lower the swap usage, and thus may increases the performance of your VPS.
Note; Do no set the value above too high, since that can have negative effect on the overall performance of your VPS
Reboot your VPS afterwards to apply all changes that you've made.