VPS Dedicated CPU showdown : Linode vs DigitalOcean

This Feb, Linode releases new plans (Dedicated CPU VPS plans, which means the CPUs run on KVM host without sharing to other neighbors). So I make this benchmark to show how good it is compared with DigitalOcean (DO) in the same plan.

Price

Linode's price has 25% lower than DO's.

Linode price

DigitalOcean price

Boot time

Linode VPS boots a bit slower than DO. (115 processes vs 96 processes)

Benchmark

I used this script (https://github.com/n-st/nench) to benchmark the minimum plan (2 vCPUs and 4GB RAM). I configured vm.swappiness = 0 to disable swap.

Linode

Processor:    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz
CPU cores:    2
Frequency:    2499.984 MHz
RAM:          3.9G
Swap:         511M
Kernel:       Linux 4.15.0-43-generic x86_64

Disks:
sda   24.5G  HDD
sdb    512M  HDD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
    3.339 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
    5.649 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
    1.535 seconds

ioping: seek rate
    min/avg/max/mdev = 60.1 us / 87.6 us / 8.98 ms / 104.1 us
ioping: sequential read speed
    generated 25.2 k requests in 5.00 s, 6.15 GiB, 5.04 k iops, 1.23 GiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
    1st run:    953.67 MiB/s
    2nd run:    1239.78 MiB/s
    3rd run:    1144.41 MiB/s
    average:    1112.62 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
    your IPv4:    139.162.5.xxxx

    Cachefly CDN:         54.08 MiB/s
    Leaseweb (NL):        6.64 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   3.18 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      1.74 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         0.29 MiB/s

IPv6 speedtests
    your IPv6:    2400:8901::xxxx

    Leaseweb (NL):        5.60 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   0.00 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      10.43 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         0.85 MiB/s
-------------------------------------------------

Digital Ocean

Processor:    Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8168 CPU @ 2.70GHz
CPU cores:    2
Frequency:    2693.670 MHz
RAM:          3.9G
Swap:         -
Kernel:       Linux 4.15.0-45-generic x86_64

Disks:
vda     25G  HDD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
    2.427 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
    4.252 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
    0.964 seconds

ioping: seek rate
    min/avg/max/mdev = 114.8 us / 185.5 us / 4.33 ms / 48.3 us
ioping: sequential read speed
    generated 4.13 k requests in 5.00 s, 1.01 GiB, 826 iops, 206.6 MiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
    1st run:    410.08 MiB/s
    2nd run:    386.24 MiB/s
    3rd run:    417.71 MiB/s
    average:    404.68 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
    your IPv4:    178.128.214.xxxx

    Cachefly CDN:         13.14 MiB/s
    Leaseweb (NL):        13.56 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   7.82 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      9.86 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         0.44 MiB/s

IPv6 speedtests
    your IPv6:    2400:6180:0:xxxx

    Leaseweb (NL):        9.57 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   0.00 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      4.95 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         0.30 MiB/s
-------------------------------------------------

Conclusion

DigitalOcean allows you run on newer hardwares so its CPU is better (~43%) than Linode's. (You can compare the result in CPU hashing section). By the way, Linode has the better price so it's your choices! :)

Hope Linode will upgrade all hardwares soon. Updated : they have new CPUs in some datacenters which are Intel Xeon Gold 6148 and AMD EPYC 7501, so stay tuned!