Best AWS Instance Type for cPanel, and other findings...

schoeps

Well-Known Member
Sep 22, 2004
115
10
168
Well, after trying practically them all, I believe the "C" series is the best as most of our server issues arise from the CPU getting overloaded. The t3 class does not seem to have a high enough offering in terms of CPU and RAM and the "burstable" performance does not seem to work at all, possibly CentOS related? cPanel needs to work on a stateless solution to fully take advantage of cloud, without any coding and serious architecture changes, your only solution is to run a dedicated instance. Anyone else here in AWS land want to share their findings?
 

cPanelLauren

Product Owner II
Staff member
Nov 14, 2017
13,266
1,301
363
Houston

schoeps

Well-Known Member
Sep 22, 2004
115
10
168
Have been testing for the last 3 months and the t3's just dont cut it on busy servers...
 

rackaid

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2003
89
28
168
Jacksonville, FL
cPanel Access Level
DataCenter Provider
We manage a number of systems on AWS - both large and small - with and without control panels. All of the instance types can be confusing.

The t-series systems use burstable CPUs. These are best suited for workloads that have low sustained CPU usage. They work on a CPU credit basis. Once you use up the CPU credits, the CPU will perform at the baseline level. This may only be at 20-30% of max capacity. For example, on t3.large, if your baseline CPU is over 30%, you system will start to use your burstable CPU credits. Once these are used, the system will be throttled if not set to unlimited.

You can see this condition on the server if %steal is high in top or sysstat. You can also see this in Cloudwatch under the CPU Credit Balance. If this is near 0, then you are constantly running above the baseline. If the system becomes throttled, you will see high concurrency and load averages. This usually results in a non-responsive server.

The M5/C5 instances do not use burstable credits.

For example, a 4 vCPU instance in C5 can run 24x7 at 100% CPU while a T3 4 vCPU can only use 30% of the CPU over the same period before it is throttled. If you set unlimited, then you will be billed for the % over the baseline. In these cases, C5/M5 can be cheaper. T3/M5 break even is 42.5% average CPU usage over 24 hours.

Unless we see swap, we have found that C5 works well for typical PHP applications. C5 instances have roughly half the RAM as T3 instances. M instances are roughly comparable to T instances except you get full vCPU performance.
 
  • Like
Reactions: cPanelLauren

PixelDad

Member
Feb 20, 2022
9
0
1
Sydney
cPanel Access Level
Root Administrator
Well, after trying practically them all, I believe the "C" series is the best as most of our server issues arise from the CPU getting overloaded. The t3 class does not seem to have a high enough offering in terms of CPU and RAM and the "burstable" performance does not seem to work at all, possibly CentOS related? cPanel needs to work on a stateless solution to fully take advantage of cloud, without any coding and serious architecture changes, your only solution is to run a dedicated instance. Anyone else here in AWS land want to share their findings?
Ah, I'm having the same problem! Which C series did you pick?