I have a reseller account with hostgator and they said it's a 8GB / 2.8 GHz machine. Right now I have a CGI application that is experiencing a little latency when executed, like about 2 seconds in total. If I upgrade to a dedicated server which would be about 1GB / 2GHz, does this necessarily mean that the app will run faster?
No. Doesn't mean a thing. It probably well but it depends on a lot of other data like how overloaded the hostgator server you're on now is, how tuned both servers are, bandwidth usage, etc.
I did a little reverse ip search and found over 100 websites on the same ip but most of them are simple sites that don't seem to be getting much traffic, just guessing. But since Im sharing resources with all these 100 websites that should hav a default effect on my one website, and thus my programs should run much faster on the dedicated server even though it's just 1GB compared to 8GB. I think my effective question is, whether 8GB shared across 100 websites would be much slower than 1 GB shared by only 1 website, etc.
Sure there can be a world of difference in either direction depending on what is being done and what type of resources are being used or over utilized. One thing to try might be a VPS first, then dedicated.
I seriously doubt Hostgator has a server with only 100 sites on it. Even I don;t have servers with that few clients of them. (I average 225 clients on a box. Each client has an average of 1.7 sites which would make it 400 sites per box. And then each one may have multiple software installs.) They may have an IP address with only 100 sites but I know when I roll out a server, it has 16 IP addresses assigned to it. Those reverse lookup sites can also have a lot of leeway as they can only list what urls they've seen and may not list all of them. And again, memory is not everything. If you have the MySQL server set up weird, a simple blog could slow down an entire server. edit: Perfect example: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1653172
I think the best thing is to test with the VPS then. But does a VPS with say 1 Ghz and 1 GB really mean to giv me 1 GB for myself to do what I want to do with it? I am using a CGI application as a benchmark to test the processing speed. This app is a compiled C++ program that is tokenising a delimited string into a list of 700,000 items, then sorting the list with a shell short algorithm. It takes 38 seconds to run, and see, Im not concerned really with bandwidth I just want to know that even though my code is not optimised yet, I can still cut down that starting time before I add options like threading and so on. All that bcz I am also testing the feasibility of this program on a web server. So if I don't see where getting better hardware would help a lot together with the code optimisation then I would be discouraged
The reseller account is a shared account, with the hundreds of websites from other clients, but the reseller server has 8GB of RAM and runs a 2.8 GHz processor. The dedicated server on the other hand has a 1GB memory chip and a 2.2 GHz processor.
on a shared account, you could be restricted on how many CPU cycles you could use and the amount of RAM you could take for yourself. on a dedicated you use all of your CPU and RAM for yourself. so that makes the difference.