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UpCloud

How to use the UpCloud API to manage your UpCloud servers

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How to use the UpCloud API to manage your UpCloud servers.

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If you have not read my previous posts I have now moved my blog etc to the awesome UpCloud host. Sign up using this link to get $25 free credit.

I recently compared Digital Ocean, Vultr and UpCloud Disk IO here and UpCloud came out on top by a long way (read the blog post here).

Here is my blog post on moving from Vultr to UpCloud.

Spoiler: UpCloud performance is great.

Upcloud Site Speed in GTMetrix

I have never had an UpCloud page load take longer than 2 seconds since moving.

UpCloud API

UpCloud has an API that we can opt into to using where we can manage servers. Read the official UpCloud API documentation here.

The API allows you to control:

  • Accounts
  • Pricing
  • Zones
  • Timezones
  • Plans
  • Servers
  • Storages
  • IP-Addresses
  • Firewall
  • Tags
  • etc

Create a sub-account to query the API 

You should create a new user account (in the UpCloud dasbboard) just for API access. I created two accounts for use on my server and on my home laptop and my server (and set a limiting IP(s) that can access it).

Create a Sub Account for API Access

Login to your UpCloud account (create an account here and get $25 free credit),

  1. Click My Accounts,
  2. Click User Accounts,
  3. Click Change on your user and enable API connections.
  4. TIP: Set up an IP rule to limit access to your API for security (I set up a VPN to get a static IP on my dynamic IP Internet host at home)).
  5. Save the changes

Enable API Connections

TIP: Lock down the account to have the minimum permissions required.

e.g

  • Disable access to the control panel (Untick).
  • Allow API Connections (Tick) and specify an IP
  • Disable access to billing contact (Untick).
  • Disable access to billing section in the control panel (Untick).
  • Disable allowing of emails to billing contact (Untick).
  • Allow or Remove access to all server (or manually add access to desired servers)
  • Allow or Remove access to modify storage  (or manually allow or remove access to desired storage)
  • etc

Lock down the account to the minimum needed

Save the account.

Now let’s make our first API call

I use OSX and I use the awesome Paw API testing tool from https://paw.cloud (This is not a plug, they are awesome). Postman is a popular API testing tool too. Any good programing language or CLI will allow you to send API requests.

First, let’s prepare the authorization string (this is a Base64 encoded combination of your username and password) read more here.

  1. Head over to https://www.base64encode.org/
  2. Click the Encode tab
  3. Add your “username:password” (without the quotes).
  4. Click Encode

A Base64 string will be outputted 🙂

e.g > eW91cmFwaXVzZXJuYW1lOnlvdXJzdXBlcnNlY3VyZXBhc3N3b3Jk

fyi

You can encode also Encode and Decode Base64 from the Ubuntu Command line

Encode Base64 from the CLI Sample

Decode Base64 from the CLI Sample

Now we can add an “Authorization Basic” token to the API request in Paw.

Authorization Header added with my base64 token.

A quick test of the UpCloud Prices API endpoint https://api.upcloud.com/1.2/price reveals the API is working.

Add Authorization Token

I can now see a full breakdown of my service prices in JSON 🙂

Query My Account

OK, Let’s see how much credit I  have left by querying the https://api.upcloud.com/1.2/account, I duplicated the item in Paw and changed the URL to https://api.upcloud.com/1.2/account but no data returned?

I had to enable “Access to Billing section in Control Panel” for the user before this data returned from the API (make sense).

> HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Query (GET)

Output

“2500.00” = cents ($25)

Query All of Your Servers

Ok, Let’s get server information by querying https://api.upcloud.com/1.2/server

Query (GET)

Output

Query Server Information

I have redated the UUID’s for my servers but once you know them you can query them by hitting https://api.upcloud.com/1.2/server/########-####-####-####-############

Query(GET)

Output

The servers name, IPv4 and IPV6 network adapters are listed, CPU(s), Memory, Disk Sized and UUID’s are all visible 🙂

Surprisingly the VNC password is visible (enabling access to the root console).

TIP: Ensure your API account is safe and secure.

Query Storage Information

Now, Let’s query the storage with the GUID from above by querying https://api.upcloud.com/1.2/storage/########-####-####-####-############

Query (GET)

Output

I can see information about the storage’s assigned server and backups 🙂

Query Backup Information

Backup storage can be queried with the same storge API endpoint https://api.upcloud.com/1.2/storage/########-####-####-####-############

Query (GET)

Output

Rename Backup

One thing that I would like to be able to do is to rename on-demand backups in the UpCloud dashboard (this is not a feature yet) but I can rename manual backup’s in the API though 🙂

Boring “On-Demand Backup” label.

Rename Backups Not possible in the GUI

I tried sending  JSON to https://api.upcloud.com/1.2/storage/########-####-####-####-############ to rename a backup but kept getting an error?

JSON

{
> “storage”: {
> “title”: “Latest manual backup , Working NGINX, PHP, MySQL w Tweaks”,
> “size”: “50”
> }
> }

Result

> “error_code” : “CONTENT_TYPE_INVALID”,
> “error_message” : “The Content-Type header has an invalid value.”

I googled and found an old manual for UpClouds API (official support here).

I added these missing content type headers (108 was the length in chars of the payload)

Still no go?

I think the content length value is wrong, more here.

I fixed it, it  turned out I had a semicolon in the Content-Type value. The JSON RFC always assumes that Content-Type is UTF8 encoded (more here).

This Fails

This Works

Now I can rename my Backup (storage). I manually calculated the length of the JSON payload and added a “Content-Length” header and value.

Query (PUT)

Output

Success 🙂

Backup Renamed

Create a Backup

Backups can be performed with a “/backup” added to the end of the query string.

Query (POST)

Output

Success (UpCloud GUI)

Conclusion

UpCloud does have great API docs.

I can easily integrate this into bash scripts to manage my servers via API and a future Java app for managing servers.

Paw does give CURL output to allow me to copy working API’s for use in BASH 🙂

More to come

  1. BASH Script to Deploy and configure a server on UpCloud via Initalization scripts (or manual) (1 week)
  2. JAVA App to manage your server (3 months)

If you are signing up for UpCloud please consider using my referral code and get $25 credit for free.

Read my setup guide here.

https://www.upcloud.com/register/?promo=D84793

I hope this guide helps someone.

 

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Revision History

v1.0 Initial Post.

I moved my domain to UpCloud (on the other side of the world) from Vultr (Sydney) and could not be happier with the performance.

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I moved my domain to UpCloud (on the other side of the world) from Vultr (Sydney) and could not be happier with the performance. Here is what I did to set up a complete Ubuntu 18.04 system (NGINX, PHP, MySQL, WordPress etc). This is not a paid review (just me documenting my steps over 2 days).

 

Background (CPanel hosts)

In 1999 I hosted my first domain (www.fearby.com) on a host in Seattle (for $10 USD a month), the host used CPanel and all was good.  After a decade I was using the domain more for online development and the website was now too slow (I think I was on dial-up or ADSdL 1 at the time). I moved my domain to an Australian host (for $25 a month).

After 8 years the domain host was sold on and performance remained mediocre. After another year the new host was sold on again and performance was terrible.

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Page load times were near 30 seconds.

I started receiving Resource Limit Is Reached warnings (basically this was a plot by the new CPanel host to say “Pay us more and this message will go away”).

This is a screenshot of my old host giving a Usage Limit Exceeded error

The straw that broke the camels back was they demanded $150/year fee for a dodgy SSL certificate.

This is a screenshot of a crappy C rated SSL certificate (measured at ssl labs)

I needed to move to a self-managed server where I was in control.

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Self Managed Server

I found a good web IDE ( http://www.c9.io/ ) that allowed me to connect to a cloud VM.  C9 allowed me to open many files and terminal windows and reconnect to them later. Don’t get excited as AWS have purchases C9 and it’s not the same.

C9 IDE

C9 IDE

I spun up a Digital Ocean Server at the closest data centre in Singapore. Here was my setup guide creating a Digital Ocean VM, connecting to it with C9 and configuring it. I moved my email to G Suite and moved my WordPress to Digital Ocean (other guides here and here).

I was happy as I could now send emails via CLI/code, set up free SSL certs, add second domain email to G Suite and Secure G Suite. No more usage limit errors either.

Self-managing servers require more work but it is more rewarding (flexible, faster and cheaper).  Page load times were now near 20 seconds (10-second improvement).

Latency Issue

Over 6 months, performance on Digital Ocean (in Singapore) from Australia started to drop (mentioned here).  I tried upgrading the memory but that did not help (latency was king).

Moved the website to Australia

I moved my domain to Vultr in Australia (guide here and here). All was good for a year until traffic growth started to increase.

This is a screenshot of google analytics showing my doubling ever 3 months traffic

I tried upgrading the memory on Vultr and I setup PHP child workers, setup Cloudflare.

GT Metrix scores were about a “B” and Google Page Speed Scores were in the lower 40’s. Page loads were about 14 seconds (5-second improvement).

Tweaking WordPress

I set up an image compression plugin in WordPress then set up a cloud image compression and CDN Plugin from the same vendor.  Page Speed info here.

GT Metrix scores were now occasionally an “A” and Page Speed Scores were in the lower 20’s. Page loads were about 3-5 seconds (10-second improvement).

Mixed bag from Vultr (more optimizing and performance weree needed).

This screenshot is showing poor www.gtmetrix.com scores , pool google page speed index scores and upgrading from 1GB to 2GB memory on my server.

Google Chrome Developer Console Audit Results on Vultr hosted website were not very good (I stopped checking as nothin helped).

This is a screenshot showing poor site performance (screenshot taken in Google Dev tools audit feature)

The problem was the Vultr server (400km away in Sydney) was offline (my issue) and everything above did (adding more memory, adding 2x CDN’s (EWWW and Cloudflare), adding PHP Child workers etc) did not seem to help???

Enter UpCloud

Recently, A friend sent a link to a blog article about a host called “UpCloud” who promised “Faster than SSD” performance.  This can’t be right “Faster than SSD”, I was intrigued.  I wanted to check it out as I thought nothing was faster than SSD (well maybe RAM).

I signed up for a trial and ran a disk IO test, read the review here and I was shocked. It’s fast. Very fast.

Summary: UpCloud was twice as fast (Disk IO and CPU) as Vultr (+ an optional $4/m firewall and $3/m for 1x backup).

This is a screenshot showing Vultr.com servers getting half the read and write disk io performance compared to upcloud.com.

fyi: Labels above are K Bytes per second. iozone loops through all file sizes from 4 Kybtes to 16,348 KBytes and measures through the reads per second. To be honest, the number meanings don’t interest me, I just want to compare apples to apples.

This is am image showing iozone results breakdown chart (kbytes per sec on vertical axis, file size in horizontal axis and transfer size on third access)

(image snip from http://www.iozone.org/ that explains the numbers)

I might have to copy my website on UpCloud and see how fast it is.

Where to Deploy and Pricing

Uplcloud Pricing: https://www.upcloud.com/pricing/

 

This images show prices form https://www.upcloud.com/pricing/

UpCloud does not have a data centre in Australia yet so why choose UpCloud.

Most of my site’s visitors are based in the US and UpCloud have disk IO twice as fast as Vultr (Win Win?).  I could deploy to Chicago?

This image sows most of my visitors are in the US

My site’s traffic is growing and I need to ensure the site is fast enough in the future.

This image shows that most of my sites visitors are hitting my site on week days.

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Creating and UpCloud VM

I used a friends referral code and signed up created my first VM.

fyi: Use my Referral code and get $25 free credit.  Sign up only takes 2 minutes.

https://www.upcloud.com/register/?promo=D84793

Signup for UpCloud, add billing details, live chat

UpCould support page is located here: https://www.upcloud.com/support/

More UpCloud Links to read

I was not sure how to log in after signing up so I went back to https://www.upcloud.com/and clicked Sign In ( https://my.upcloud.com/login ).

Now I can see a dashboard 🙂

 

This image sows the www.ucloud.com dashboard main page.

I was happy to see 24/7 support is available.

This image shows the www.upcloud.com live chat

UpCloud Dashboard

After logging in I noticed I could customize the dashboard.

This image shows the www.upcloud.com dashboard (post login) allows you to customize the dahsboard

It would be nice to see an UpCloud API or some way that I can push data to the dashboard from my VM (via scheduled cron jobs). I’d really like to see my data in this dashboard, not at the level of PM2 but things like CPU/Memory history, logs, disk used/free, connections etc

UpCloud Trial Mode

I am not sure what limits to the trial mode (5 days)?

Image showing (via a html dialog) that I am in trail mode

Deploy My First UpCloud Server

This is how I deployed a server.

If you are going to deploy a server consider using my referral code and get $25 credit for free.

Under the “deploy a server” widget I named the server and choose a location (I think I was supposed to use an FQDN name (e.g “fearby.com”)). The deploy worked though. I clicked continue, then more options were made available.

  1. Enter a short server description.
  2. Choose a location (Frankfurt, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Singapore, London and Chicago)
  3. Choose the number of CPU’s and amount of memory
  4. Specify disk number/names and type (MaxIOPS or HDD).
  5. Choose an Operating System
  6. Select a Timezone
  7. Define SSH Keys for access
  8. Allowed login methods
  9. Choose hardware adapter types
  10. Where the send the login password

This image shows all of he deploy server options at www.upcloud.com

fyi How to generate a new SSH Key (on OSX or Ubuntu)

Output

Did the key export (yes)

> /temp# ls /temp/ -al
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 9 15:33 .
> drwxr-xr-x 27 root root 4096 Jun 8 14:25 ..
> -rw——- 1 user user 1766 Jun 9 15:33 example_rsa
> -rw-r–r– 1 user user 396 Jun 9 15:33 example_rsa.pub

“example_rsa” is the private key and “example_rsa.pub “is the public key.

  • The public key needs to be added to the server to allow access.
  • The private key needs to be added to any local connecting ssh program.

Initialization script (after deployment)

I was pleased to see an initialization script section that calls actions after the server is deployed. I configured the initialization script to pull down a few GB of backups from my Vultr website in Syndey (files now removed).

This was my Initialization script.

Confirm and Deploy

I clicked “Confirm and deploy” but I had an alert that said trial mode can only deploy servers up to 1024MB of memory.

This image shows I cant deploy servers with 2/GB in trial modeExiting UpCloud Trial Mode

I opened the dashboard and clicked My Account then Billing, I could see the $25 referral credit but I guess I cant use that in Trial.

I exited trail mode by deposited $10 (USD).

This image shows me depositing funds into upcloud.com

fyi: Server prices are listed below (or view prices here).

 

This image shows upcloud.com prices at http://upcloud.com/pricing

Now I can go back and deploy the server with the same settings above (1x CPU, 2GB Memory, Ubuntu 18.04, MaxIOPS Storage etc)

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Deploy in progress.

This image shows a server being deployed (progress bar)

UpCloud Server Deployed

The server is now deployed, now I can connect to it with my SSH program (vSSH).  Simply add the server’s IP, username, password and the SSH private key (generated above) to your ssh program of choice.

fyi: The public key contents start with “ssh-rsa”.

This image shows me connecting to my sever via ssh

I noticed that the initialization script downloaded my 2+GB of files already. Nice.

UpCloud Billing Breakdown

I can now see in UpCloud billing page in my dashboard that credit is deducted daily (68c), at this rate, I have 49 days credit left?

Billing Usage

I can manually deposit funds or set up automatic payments 🙂

UpCloud Backup Options

Backup This image shows me backing up my server

Note: Backup are charged at $0,056 for every GB stored – so $5,6 for every 100GB per month (half that for 50GB etc)

I made a manual backup and can set an automatic schedule if need be. Nice.

This image sows possible backup schedules.

UpCloud Firewall Options

I set up a firewall at UpCloud to only allow the minimum number of ports (UpCoud DNS, HTTP, HTTPS and My IP to port 22).  The firewall feature is charged at $0.0056 an hour ($4.03 a month)

I love the ability to set firewall rules on incoming, destination and outgoing ports.

this image shows firewall options

Update: I updated my firewall to allow inbound ICMP (IPv4/IPv6) and UDP (IPv4/IPv6) packets.

Firewall Rules Allow port 80, 443 and DNS

Because my internet provider has a dynamic IP, I set up a VPN with a static IP and whitelisted it for backdoor access.

Local Ubuntu ufw Firewall

I duplicated the rules in my local ufw (2nd level) firewall (and blocked mail)

UpCloud Download Speeds

I pulled down a 1.8GB Ubuntu 18.08 Desktop ISO 3 times from gigenet.com and the file downloaded in 32 seconds (57MB/sec). Nice.

Install Common Ubuntu Packages

I installed common Ubuntu packages.

Timezone

I checked the servers time (I thought this was auto set before I deployed)?

I reset the time to Australia/Sydney.

Now the timezone is set 🙂

Shell History

I increase the shell history.

SSH Login

I created a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file and added my SSH public key to allow password-less logins.

I added my pubic ssh key I exited the ssh session and logged back in. I can now log in without password.

Install NGINX

nginx/1.14.0 is now installed.

A quick GT Metrix test.

This image shows awesome static nginx performance ratings of of 99%

Install MySQL

Run these commands to install and secure MySQ.

Securing the MySQL server deployment.
> Would you like to setup VALIDATE PASSWORD plugin?: n
> New password: **********************************************
> Re-enter new password: **********************************************
> Remove anonymous users? (Press y|Y for Yes, any other key for No) : y
> Disallow root login remotely? (Press y|Y for Yes, any other key for No) : y
> Remove test database and access to it? (Press y|Y for Yes, any other key for No) : y
> Reload privilege tables now? (Press y|Y for Yes, any other key for No) : y
> Success.

I disabled the validate password plugin because I hate it.

MySQL Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.7.22 is now installed.

Set MySQL root login password type

Set MySQL root use to authenticate via “mysql_native_password”. Run the “mysql” command.

Now lets set the root password authentication method to “mysql_native_password”

Check Authentication method

Now we need to flush permissions

Done

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Install PHP

Install PHP 7.2

PHP 7.2.5, Zend Engine v3.2.0 with Zend OPcache v7.2.5-1 is now installed. Do update PHP frequently.

I made the following changes in /etc/php/7.2/fpm/php.ini

> cgi.fix_pathinfo=0
> max_input_vars = 1000
> memory_limit = 1024M
> max_file_uploads = 20M
> post_max_size = 20M

Install PHP Modules

sudo apt-get install php-pear php7.2-curl php7.2-dev php7.2-mbstring php7.2-zip php7.2-mysql php7.2-xml

Install PHP FPM

Configure PHP FPM config

Edit /etc/php/7.2/fpm/php.ini

> cgi.fix_pathinfo=0
> max_input_vars = 1000
> memory_limit = 1024M
> max_file_uploads = 20M
> post_max_size = 20M

Reload php sudo service

Install PHP Modules

Configuring NGINX

If you are not comfortable editing NGINX config files read here, here and here.

I made a new “www root” folder, set permissions and created a default html file.

I edited the “root” key in “/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default” file and set the root a new location (e.g” /www-root”)

I added these performance tweaks to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

> worker_cpu_affinity auto;
> worker_rlimit_nofile 100000

I add the following lines to “http {” section in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Check NGINX Status

Install Open SSL that supports TLS 1.3

This is a work in progress. The steps work just fine for me on Ubuntu 16.04. but not Ubuntu 18.04.?

Instaling Adminer MySQL GUI

I will use the PHP based Adminer MySQL GUI to export and import my blog from one server to another. All I needed to do is install it on both servers (simple 1 file download)

Use Adminer to Export My Blog (on Vultr)

On the original server open Amdiner (http) and..

  1. Login with the MySQL root account
  2. Open your database
  3. Choose “Save” as the output
  4. Click on Export

This image shows the export of the wordpress adminer page

Save the “.sql” file.

I used Adminer on the UpCloud server to Import My Blog

fyi: Depending on the size of your database backup you may need to temporarily increase your upload and post sizes limits in PHP and NGINX before you can import your database

Edit /etc/php/7.2/fpm/php.ini
> max_file_uploads = 100M
> post_max_size =100M

And Edit: /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
> client_max_body_size 100M;

Don’t forget to reload NGINX config and restart NGINX and PHP. Take note of the maximum allowed file size in the screenshot below. I temporarily increased my upload limits to 100MB to upload to be able to restore my 87MB blog.

Now I could open Adminer on my UpCloud server.

  1. Create a new database
  2. Click on the database and click Import
  3. Choose the SQL file
  4. Click Execute to import it

Import MuSQL backup with Adminer

Don’t forget to create a user and assign permissions (as required (check your wp-config.php file)).

Import MySQL Database

Tip: Don’t forget to lower the maximum upload file size and max post size  after you import your database,

Cloudflare DNS

I use Cloudflare to manage DNS, I need to tell it about my new server.

You can get your servers IP details from the UpCloud dashboard.

Find IP Details in UpCloud

At Cloudflare update your DNS details to point to the serves new IPv4 (“A Record”) and IPv6 (“AAAA Record”).

Cloudflare DNS

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Domain Error

I waited an hour and my website was suddenly unavailable.  At first, I thought this was Cloudflare forcing the redirection of my domain to HTTP (that was not yet set up).

DNS Not Replicated Yet

I chatted with UpCloud chat on their webpage and they kindly assisted me to diagnose all the common issues like DNS values, DNS replication, Cloudflare settings and the error was pinpointed to my NGINX installation.  All NGINX config settings were ok from what we could see?  I uninstalled NGINX and reinstalled it (and that fixed it). Thanks, UpCloud Support 🙂

Reinstalled NGINX

I reinstalled NGINX and reconfigured /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (I downloaded my SSL cert from my old server just in case).

Here is my /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file.

Here is my /etc/nginx/sites-available/default file (fyi, I have not fully re-setup TLS 1.3 yet so I remarked the settings out)

SSL Labs SSL Certificate Check

All good thanks to the config above.

SSL Labs

Install WP-CLI

I don’t like setting up FTP to auto-update WordPress plugins. I use the WP-CLI tool to manage WordPress installations by the command line. Read my blog here on using WP-CLI.

Download WP-CLI

Move WP-CLI to the bin folder as “wp”

Test wp

Update WordPress Plugins

Now I can run “wp plugin update” to update all WordPress plugins

Update WordPress Core

WordPress core file can be updated with “wp core update”

Troubleshooting: Use the flag “–allow-root “if wp needs higher access (unsafe action though).

Install PHP Child Workers

I edited the following file to setup PHP child workers /etc/php/7.2/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

Changes

> pm = dynamic
> pm.max_children = 40
> pm.start_servers = 15
> pm.min_spare_servers = 5
> pm.max_spare_servers = 15
> pm.process_idle_timeout = 30s;
> pm.max_requests = 500;
> php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/www-fpm-php.www.log
> php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 512M

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Restart PHP

Test NGINX config, reload NGINX config and restart NGINX

Output (14 workers are ready)

Memory Tweak (set at your own risk)

vm.swappiness = 1

Setting swappiness = 1 all but disables the swap file and tells the Operating System to aggressively use ram, a value of 10 is safer. Only set this if you have enough memory available (and free).

Possible swappiness settings:

> vm.swappiness = 0 Swap is disabled. In earlier versions, this meant that the kernel would swap only to avoid an out of memory condition when free memory will be below vm.min_free_kbytes limit, but in later versions, this is achieved by setting to 1.[2]> vm.swappiness = 1 Kernel version 3.5 and over, as well as Red Hat kernel version 2.6.32-303 and over: Minimum amount of swapping without disabling it entirely.
> vm.swappiness = 10 This value is sometimes recommended to improve performance when sufficient memory exists in a system.[3]
> vm.swappiness = 60 The default value.
> vm.swappiness = 100 The kernel will swap aggressively.

The “htop” tool is a handy memory monitoring tool to “top”

Also you can use good old “watch” command to show near-live memory usage (auto-refreshes every 2 seconds)

Script to auto-clear the memory/cache

As a habit, I am setting a cronjob to check when free memory falls below 100MB cache is automatically cleared (freeing memory).

Script Contents: clearcache.sh

I set the cronjob to run every 15 mins, I added this to my cronjob

Sample log output

I will check the log (/scripts/clearcache.log) in a few days and view the memory trends.

After 1/2 a day Ubuntu 18.04 is handling memory just fine, no externally triggered cache clears have happened 🙂

Free memory over time

I used https://crontab.guru/every-hour to set the right schedule in crontab.

I rebooted the VM.

Swap File

fyi: Here is a handy guide on viewing swap file usage here. I’m not using swap files so it is only fyi.

After the system rebooted I checked if the swappiness setting was active.

Yes, swappiness is set.

File System Tweaks – Write Back Cache (set at your own risk)

First, check  your disk name and file system

Take note of your disk name (e.g vda1)

I used TuneFS to enable writing data to the disk before writing to the journal. tunefs is a great tool for setting file system parameters.

Warning (snip from here): “I set the mode to journal_data_writeback. This basically means that data may be written to the disk before the journal. The data consistency guarantees are the same as the ext3 file system. The downside is that if your system crashes before the journal gets written then you may loose new data — the old data may magically reappear.”

Warning this can corrupt your data. More information here.

I ran this command.

I edited my fstab to append the “writeback,noatime,nodiratime” flags for my volume after a reboot.

Edit FS Tab:

I added “writeback,noatime,nodiratime” flags to my disk options.

Updating Ubuntu Packages

Show updatable packages

Update Packages

Unattended Security Updates

Read more on Ubuntu 18.04 Unattended upgrades here, here and here.

Install Unattended Upgrades

Enable Unattended Upgrades

Now I configure what packages not to auto update

Edit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

Find “Unattended-Upgrade::Package-Blacklist” and add packages that you don’t want automatically updated, you may want to manually update these (and monitor updates).

I prefer not to auto-update critical system apps (I will do this myself).

fyi: You can find installed packages by running this command:

Enable Automatic updates by editing /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades

Edit the number at the end (the number is how many days to wait before updating) of each line.

> APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists “1”;
> APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages “1”;
> APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval “7”;
> APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade “1”;

Set to “0” to disable automatic updates.

The results of unattended-upgrades will be logged to /var/log/unattended-upgrades

Update packages now

Almost done.

I Rebooted

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GT Metrix Score

I almost fell off my chair. It’s an amazing feeling hitting refresh in GT Metrix and getting sub 2-second score consistently.

GT Metrix

I ran a GT Metrix score again 2 day’s later and I get a 1.5-second result again.

1.5 Second Page Load

WebPageTest.org Test Score

Nice, I am not sure why the Effective use of CDN has an X as I have the EWWW CDN and Cloudflare. First Byte time is now a respectable “B”, This was always bad.

Update: I found out the longer you set cache delays in Cloudflare the higher the score.

Web Page Test

GT Metrix has a nice historical breakdown of load times (night and day)

Upcloud Site Speed in GTMetrix

Google Page Speed Insight Desktop Score

This will help with future SEO rankings. It is well known that Google is pushing fast servers.

Page Speed Test

Google Chrome 69 Dev Console Audit (Desktop)

This is amazing, I never expected to get this high score.  I know Google like (and are pushing) sub 1-second scores.

Page Audit

My site is loading so well it is time I restored some old features that were too slow on other servers

  • I disabled Lazy loading of images (this was not working on some android devices)
  • I readded the News Widget and news images.

Added news feature

GTMetrix and WebpageTest sores are still good (even after adding bloat)

Benchmarks are still good

fyi: WordPress Plugins I use.

These are the plugins I use.

How I use these plugins to speed up my site.

  • I use EWWW Image Optimizer plugin to auto-compress my images and to provide a CDN for media asset deliver (pre-Cloudflare). Learn more about ExactDN and EWWW.io here.
  • I use Autoptimize plugin to optimize HTML/JSS/JS and ensure select assets are on my EWWW CDN. This plugin also removes WordPress Emojis, removed the use of Google Fonts, allows you to define pre-configured domains, Async Javascript-files etc.
  • I use BJ Lazy Load to prevent all images in a post from loading on load (and only as the user scrolls down the page).
  • GTmetrix for WordPress and Cloudflare plugins are for information only?
  • I use WP-Optimize to ensure my database of healthy and to disable comments/trackbacks and pingbacks.

Let’s Test UpCloud’s Disk IO in Chicago

Looks good to me, Read IO is a little bit lower than UpCloud’s Singapore data centre but still, it’s faster than Vultr.  I can’t wait for more data centres to become available around the world.

Why is UpCloud Disk IO so good?

I asked UpCloud on Twitter why the Disk IO was so good.

  • “MaxIOPS is UpCloud’s proprietary block-storage technology. MaxIOPS is physically redundant storage technology where all customers data is located in two separate physical devices at all times. UpCloud uses InfiniBand (!) network to connect storage backends to compute nodes, where customers cloud servers are running. All disks are enterprise-grade SSD’s. And using separate storage backends, it allows us to live migrate our customers cloud servers freely inside our infrastructure between compute nodes – whether it be due to hardware malfunction (compute node) or backend software updates (example CPU vulnerability and immediate patching).“

My Answers to Questions to support

Q1) Whats the difference between backups and snapshots (a Twitter user said Snapshots were a thing)

A1)Backup’s and snapshots are the same things with our infrastructure.

Q2) What are charges for backup of a 50GB drive?

A2) We charge $0.06 / GB of the disk being captured. But capture the whole disk, not just what was used. So for a 50GB drive, we charge $0.06 * 50 = $3/month. Even if 1GB were only used.

  • Support confirmed that each backup is charged (so 5 times manual backups are charged 5 times). Setting up a daily auto backup schedule for 2 weeks would create 14 billable backup charges.
  • I guess a 25GB server will be $1.5 a month

Q3) What are data charges after if I go over my 2TB quota?

A3) Outgoing data charges are $0.056/GB after the pre-configured allowance.

Q4) What happens if my balance hits $0

A4) You will get notification of low account balance 2 weeks in advance based on your current daily spend. When your balance reaches zero, your servers will be shut down. But they will still be charged for. You can automatically top-up if you want to assign a payment type from your Control Panel. You deposit into your balance when you want. We use a prepay model of payment, so you need to top up before using, not billing you after usage. We give you lots of chances to top-up.

Support Tips

  • One thing to note, when deleting servers (CPU, RAM) instances, you get the option to delete the storages separately via a pop-up window. Choose to delete permanently to delete the disk. To save credit. Any disk storage lying around even unattached to servers will be billed for.
  • Charges are in USD.

I think its time to delete my domain from Vultr in Sydney.

Deleted my Vultr domain

I deleted my Vultr domain.

Delete Vultr Server

Done

More Reading on UpCloud

https://www.upcloud.com/documentation/faq/

UpCloud Server Status

http://status.upcloud.com

What I would like

  1. Ability to name individual manual backup’s (tag with why I backed up).
  2. Ability to push user defined data from my VM to the dashboard
  3. Cheaper scheduled backups
  4. Sydney data-centres (one day)

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Update: Post UpCloud Launch Tweaks (Awesome)

I had a look at https://www.webpagetest.org/ results to see where else I can optimize webpage delivery.

Optimisation Options

Disable dasjhicons.min.css (for unauthenticated WordPress users).

Find functions.php in the www root

Edit functions.php

Add the following

HTTP2 Push

I added http2 to my listening servers

I tested a http2 push page by defining this in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default 

Once I tested push (demo here) was working I then defined two files to push that were being sent from my server

I used the WordPress Plugin Autoptimize to remove Google font usage (this removed a number of files being loaded when my page loads).

I used the WordPress Plugin WP-Optimize plugin into to remove comments and disable pingbacks and trackbacks.

WordPress wp-config.php tweaks

Tweaks Todo

  • Compress placeholder BJ Lazy Load Image (plugin is broken)
  • Solve 2x Google Analytics tracker redirects

Conclusion

I love Cloudflare for providing a fast CDN

I love ewww.io’s automatic Image Compression and Resizing plugin that automatically handles image optimizations and pre Cloudflare/first hit CDN caching.

I love UpClouds fast servers, give them a go (use my link and get $25 free credit).

Let the results speak for themselves (sub <1 second load times).

Results

I hope this guide helps someone.

Please consider using my referral code and get $25 credit for free.

https://www.upcloud.com/register/?promo=D84793

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Revision History

v7.1 Added RSA Private key info

v1.7 – Added new firewall rules info.

v1.6 – Added more bloat to the site, still good.

v1.5 Improving Accessibility

v1.4 Added Firewall Price

v1.3 Added wp-config and plugin usage descriptions.

v1.2 Added GTMetrix historical chart.

v1.1 Fixed free typos and added final conclusion images.

v1.0 Added final results

v0.9 added more tweaks (http2 push, removing unwanted files etc)

v0.81 Draft  – Added memory usage chart and added MaxIOPS info from UpCloud.

v0.8 Draft post.

Measuring VM performance (CPU, Disk, Latency, Concurrent Users etc) on Ubuntu and comparing Vultr, Digital Ocean and UpCloud – Part 4 of 4

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How can you measure VM performance (CPU, Disk, Latency, Concurrent Users etc) on Ubuntu and comparing Vultr, Digital Ocean and UpCloud – Part 4 of 4

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Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or Part 4

I ran the MySQL benchmark preparation command again (no problem this time).

Test table and records created

Test Records Created

Now I can benchmark MySQL on my main server.

RAW Output

Results

queries performed (in 60 seconds):

  • read: 336210
  • other: 48030
  • total: 384240

I decided to add an index to see if I can speed this query up (read the MySQL index page here). I added an index (in Adminer) on the columns “Id” and “pad” for the sbtest table in the test database

I restarted the MySQL process

I ran the same benchmark again.

Raw Output

Results

The quick index added 20% extra throughput on queries 🙂

Mysql before and after an index

Don’t forget to delete your test database

Viewing MySQL Index Usage (on the “test” database)

Query to show Index stats for a table ‘test’

I can see the MySQL PRIMARY index is getting used 🙂

Index Summary

Read more in viewable query stats (columns) here.

Other System Information Tools

Show processor information

Output

Memory Information

You can assign 512MB, 1GB, 2GB or more memory to a server on Vultr, Read my guide here on upgrading resources for Vultr VM’s here.

Only upgrade your server’s memory when server processes demand it, there is no need to pay for extra idle memory. Read my older guides on upgrading Digital Ocean and AWS servers.

I use the htop utility to monitor memory and processes. The memory usage will depend on how you have configured your server to use connection pools in code, MySQL or services.  Also what memory demands do you get in pean bandwidth times?

HTOP

You can check your server memory details on Ubuntu with this command

Output

Use Memory or Disk (Swap)

You can configure the use of Memory over Disk by configuring your/etc/sysctl.conf file (setting value “vm.swappiness”)

You can check your swap file settings by running the following command

Or By running

Set a new swap file value by editing /etc/sysctl.conf

Set the following to use more ram over the swap disk.

Read about swappiness values here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swappiness

Service Performance

Performance (and allocated resources) depends on the demands of your operating system and installed software

What operating system do you have?

View NGINX Status, how much memory does it use?

PHP (and Child Worker) status how much memory does it use and how many child workers do you have? Read my add PHP child workers post here (and update to PHP 7.2 here)

MySQL Status

Shared VM Hosts

One of the biggest impacts (after server latency) for your server is not the disk performance but the number of hosts/websites on the server who are also using the disk and server resources.

Reverse IP Lookup

I have 80 other web servers on my server (based on a reverse lookup).

I may move to a dedicated box when I can afford it.

Security

Above all else ensure that security is number 1 priority and make performance second priority.

Scan your site with Zap, Qualys and Kali Linux. Performance means nothing if you are hacked.

website-report

Simulated concurrent users

You can use Siege to test the maximum concurrent users accessing your site before the server starts to drop connections.

FYI: If you use Cloudflare (you should) this may not work as it will block connections.

Install Siege

Test  your server with 10 concurrent serves for 1 minute

Results

Keep upping the connections (from 10 above) to a limit where connections start dropping.

I tried 25 then 50 concurrent users hitting a server on Digital Ocean and it did not fail.

Conclusion

  • Choose a server near your customers
  • Change hosts if one is faster and cheaper
  • Measure or benchmark your server (and compare over time).
  • Use Cloudflare

Create your own server today

  • Create your own server on Vultr here.
  • Create your own server on Digital Ocean here.
  • Create your own server on UpCloud here.

And remember you can install the Runcloud server management dashboard here.

I hope this guide helps someone.

 

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Measuring VM performance (CPU, Disk, Latency, Concurrent Users etc) on Ubuntu and comparing Vultr, Digital Ocean and UpCloud – Part 3 of 4

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How can you measure VM performance (CPU, Disk, Latency, Concurrent Users etc) on Ubuntu and comparing Vultr, Digital Ocean and UpCloud – Part 3 of 4

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Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or Part 4

I used these commands to generate bonnie++ reports from the data in part 2

Image of results here

Bonnie Results

Network Performace

IMHO Network Latency is the biggest impact on server performance, Read my old post on scalability on a budget here. I am in Australia an having a server in Singapore was too far away and latency was terrible.

Here is a non-scientific example of pinging a Vultr, Digital Ocean and UpCloud server in three different locations (and Google).

Ping Test

Test Ping Results

Latency matters, run a https://www.webpagetest.org/ scan over your site to see why.

Adding https added almost 0.7 seconds to https communications in the past on Digital Ocean (a few thousand kilometres away). The longer the latency the longer HTTPS handshakes take.

SSL

Deploying a server to Singapore (in my experience) is bad if your visitors are in Australia. But deploying to other regions may be lower in cost though. It’s a trade off.

Server Location

Deploy servers as close as you can to your customers is the best tip for performance.

Deploy serves close to your customers

Also, consider setting up Image Optimization and Image CDN plugins (guide here) in WordPress and using Cloudflare (guide here)

Benchmarking with SysBench

Install CPU Benchmark

CPU Benchmark (Vultr/Sydney)

Result

39.15 seconds

CPU Benchmark (Digital Ocean/London)

Result

33.43 sec

CPU Benchmark (UpCloud/Singapore)

Result

23.77 sec

Surprisingly, 1st place in prime generation goes to UpCloud, then Digital Ocean then Vultr.  UpCloud has some good processors.

Processors:

  • UpCLoud (Singapore): Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2687W v4 @ 3.00GHz
  • Digital Ocean (London): Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz
  • Vultr (Sydney): Virtual CPU a7769a6388d5 (Masked/Hidden CPU @ 2.40GHz)

(Lower is better)

prime benchmark results

(oops, typo in the chart should say Vultr)

Benchmark the file IO

Confirm free space

Install Sysbench

I had 10GB free on all servers (Vultr, Digitial Ocean and UpCloud) so I created a 10GB test file.

Now I can run the benchmark and use the pre-created text file.

SysBench description from the Ubuntu manpage.

“SysBench is a modular, cross-platform and multi-threaded benchmark tool for evaluating OS parameters that are important for a system running a database under intensive load. The idea of this benchmark suite is to quickly get an impression about system performance without setting up complex database benchmarks or even without installing a database at all.”

SysBench Results (Vultr/Sydney)

SysBench Results (Digital Ocean/London)

SysBench Results (UpCloud/Singapore)