Comparing Nginx performance in bare metal and virtual environments
In this technical retrospective (2021), @el_duderino shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 132 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 80 comments
Yes, perfs are better on bare metal, and it's cheaper too. In fact, even a cheap VPS will perform better than the cloud for much less money, and scale vertically to incredible highs.
You do have to do a lot of things manually, and even doing that, you won't get the high availability and elasticity you have the potential to get from a cloud offer. Potential being the key word though.
But honestly, most projects don't need it.
Crashing used to terrify me. One day I started to work for a client that had his service down once a month.
Guess what ? Nothing happened. No customers ever complained. No money was lost, in fact, the cash flow kept growing.
Most services are not so important they can't get switched off once in a while.
Not to mention, monoliths are more robust they are given credit for.
I recently moved a smallish business application from two bare-metal servers onto Azure VMs. It's a standard PHP 7.4 application, MySQL, Redis, nginx. Despite the VMs costing more and having twice the spec of the bare-metal servers, it has consistently performed slower and less reliably throughout the stack. The client's budget is too small to spend much time looking into it. Instead, they upped the spec even further, and what used to cost £600 per month now costs £2000.
Am I reading correctly that there is a huge difference in http versus SSL requests per second? e.g. in the Bare Metal 1 CPU case it's 48k http to 800 SSL? I had no idea the performance impact of SSL was that huge, if this is correct.
Who actually runs Centos 7 ( Kernel 3.10 ) for benchmarks in 2021? Run something recent like Ubuntu 20 + KVM, you will see big difference. I don't beleive modern virtualization has ~20% overhead ( it should be less than 5% ).
I saw quite a significant performance and resource usage benefit from migrating away from a virtualized kubernetes environment to bare metal debian, so their findings align well with my anecdata as well.