Magento 2.3 performance on different AWS instances C5 vs Z1

Can CPU clock speed improve PHP Magento 2 performance

4 min readMar 17, 2020

C5 instance

Amazon EC2 C5 instances are the next generation of the Amazon EC2 Compute Optimized instance family. C5 instances offer the lowest price per vCPU in the Amazon EC2 family and are ideal for running advanced compute-intensive workloads. This includes workloads such as high performance web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, video encoding, scientific modelling, distributed analytics and machine/deep learning inference.

C5.large — 61$/month

3.0 Ghz Intel Xeon Platinum 8124M

2 vCPU

4 GiB memory

EBS only

Upto 2250 Mbps EBS throughput

Up to 10 Gigabit networking performance

Z1 instance

Amazon EC2 z1d instances deliver high single thread performance due to a custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor with a sustained all core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz, the fastest of any cloud instance. z1d provides both high compute performance and high memory, which is ideal for electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, and certain relational database workloads with high per-core licensing costs.

Z1s.large — 151$/month

4.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum 8151

2 vCPU

16 GiB memory

1 x 75 NVMe SSD

Up to 10 Gigabit networking performance

Performance measurement 50 samples concurrency 1

Why CPU?

Because Magento 2 is PHP CPU intensive framework (5M lines of code).

Ratio between PHP and Database(MySQL/Redis IO)

Database = 194ms+48ms =242ms

PHP time = 906ms

Response time = 906+242 = 1148ms

906PHP/1148Request = 78.92% of the request is CPU time.

242Database/1148Request =21.08% of the request is I/O Database time.

databaseDuration = Total time of all database calls for any functions we instrument as Database functions. So MySQL/PDO/PostgreSQL/Redis/Memcache type calls that are instrumented and appear in New Relic.

PHP Time = total response time — (databaseDuration) — This is a calculated factor that if our instrumented external calls and database calls. Time spent in PHP code that wasn’t external calls or database calls.

1.Home page speed.

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   37   4.5     36      66
Processing:   321  348  22.5    345     471
Waiting:      104  113   9.4    110     141
Total:        357  386  24.3    382     507

Result: 110ms

Z1d

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   37   3.7     36      56
Processing:   201  346  33.8    338     442
Waiting:       99  109  13.4    104     178
Total:        240  383  33.8    378     479

Result: 104ms

2.Configurable product

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   37   2.1     37      45
Processing:   464  496  29.4    490     622
Waiting:      281  309  29.3    301     428
Total:        500  533  29.2    529     658

Result:301

Z1d

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   38   3.2     36      48
Processing:   477  516  27.2    507     598
Waiting:      251  272  16.5    271     342
Total:        512  553  26.9    546     633

Result: 271ms

3.Configurable products

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   41  13.2     37     105
Processing:   767  864 128.2    813    1436
Waiting:      366  414  92.5    394    1027
Total:        802  905 130.7    851    1476

Result: 394ms

Z1d

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   38   4.3     37      56
Processing:   530  768  65.8    759    1058
Waiting:      325  351  21.7    347     422
Total:        566  807  66.2    797    1096

Result: 347ms

4.Section AJAX load

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   39   5.6     37      69
Processing:    86   95   9.9     93     141
Waiting:       86   95   9.8     92     141
Total:        122  134  12.8    130     192

Result: 92ms

Z1d

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   39   5.1     37      61
Processing:    81   87   7.8     85     126
Waiting:       81   87   7.8     85     126
Total:        117  125  10.9    122     187

Result: 85ms

5.FPC performance

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   41   6.3     39      58
Processing:   290  333  63.5    317     729
Waiting:       60   69   9.5     66     104
Total:        325  374  64.0    361     765

Result: 66 ms

Z1d

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       35   40   7.3     37      74
Processing:   288  325  21.8    323     372
Waiting:       62   69   6.9     66      86
Total:        323  366  23.7    363     414

Result: 66ms

FPC speed average result is the same 66ms however max delay is 104ms vs 86 ms

6.Add To CART

Result: 316

Z1d

Result: 291

Pivot Table:

Basically, by buying faster CPU you can achieve better performance. I’m considering GPU processors will be the best for Magneto. However run Magento on fast CPU is 2 times expansive 61$ vs 151$ per 2 vCPU.