KVM performance tweaks

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.

  • performance, tweaks, tuning
  • 8 Users Found This Useful
Was this answer helpful?

Related Articles

On which location in NL is my VPS being hosted?

By default we host most of our VPS services in our primary facility located in the city "Dronten"...

How do I use my assigned IPv6 subnet?

All VPSes will get a /64 IPv6 subnet assigned.During the installation, one IPv6 address will be...

How does upgrading or downgrading works?

If you would like to upgrade your VPS, please login into our Client Panel.Under the "My Services"...

Is there a possibility to run BGP on my VPS?

We offer BGP services, but due to maintaining configurations and preventing a lot of changes we...

What hardware specs does the LiteServer VPS platform have?

Hardware specifications vary across our platform and depends on the kind of VPS plan you order,...