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Testing Alpine Linux on Freebox VPS

Note: The Freebox service has been discontinued as on 2020. The below post has been retained for posterity.

Introduction

User Pentium44 on Lowendtalk offered the community to test out the Freebox Virtual Private server with the following specifications:

Tiny VM Specs:
CPU: .25 Xeon E5649 core
RAM: 384MB
Vdisk: 25GB,
KVM Debian 7.11.0

Micro VM Specs:
CPU: .10 Xeon E5649 core
RAM: 32MB,
Vdisk: 5GB,
KVM SliTaz 2.0
I had opted for the slit version, but Pentium44 decided to create a uniform set of specs-
OS: Alpine Linux (current)
RAM: 128MB dedicated
CPU: 25% of 1 Xeon E5649 core
Vdisk: 10GB
Qemu KVM emulation

Alpine Linux Wiki

Alpine Linux has a rather well documented wiki

There was a time when I used to think alpine Linux was derived from arch linux, so my first step was to type
sudo pacman....
which of course did not work, had to look up the Alpine Linux package management page. Other than the un-learning and re-learning which was rather quick, not too much to complain with alpine.

@free.vpsbox.info -p 3622
[email protected]'s password:
freebox:~$ curl -s yabs.sh | bash
-ash: bash: not found
-ash: curl: not found
freebox:~$ sudo apk add curl bash
[sudo] password for user:
(1/6) Installing readline (8.0.0-r0)
(2/6) Installing bash (5.0.0-r0)
Executing bash-5.0.0-r0.post-install
(3/6) Installing ca-certificates (20190108-r0)
(4/6) Installing nghttp2-libs (1.39.2-r0)
(5/6) Installing libcurl (7.66.0-r0)
(6/6) Installing curl (7.66.0-r0)
Executing busybox-1.30.1-r2.trigger
Executing ca-certificates-20190108-r0.trigger
OK: 679 MiB in 145 packages

The below test results are from the ‘Alpine’ setup.

freebox:~$ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script/master/yabs.sh | bash

Results from Yet Another Benchmarking Script (YABS)

Sun Oct 20 22:55:49 PDT 2019

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor : QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.5+
CPU cores : 1 @ 2526.998 MHz
AES-NI : ❌ Disabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
BusyBox v1.30.1 (2019-06-12 17:51:55 UTC) multi-call binary.

Usage: free [-b/k/m/g]

Display the amount of free and used system memory
RAM :
BusyBox v1.30.1 (2019-06-12 17:51:55 UTC) multi-call binary.

Usage: free [-b/k/m/g]

Display the amount of free and used system memory
Swap :
df: unrecognized option: t
BusyBox v1.30.1 (2019-06-12 17:51:55 UTC) multi-call binary.

Usage: df [-PkmhTai] [-B SIZE] [FILESYSTEM]...

Print filesystem usage statistics

-P POSIX output format
-k 1024-byte blocks (default)
-m 1M-byte blocks
-h Human readable (e.g. 1K 243M 2G)
-T Print filesystem type
-a Show all filesystems
-i Inodes
-B SIZE Blocksize
Disk :

Disk Speed Tests:
---------------------------------
| Test 1 | Test 2 | Test 3 | Avg
| | | |
Write | 0.00 MB/s | 0.00 MB/s | 0.00 MB/s | 0.00 MB/s
Read | 95.27 MB/s | 98.99 MB/s | 99.14 MB/s | 97.80 MB/s
Testing VPS with Alpine Linux Installation
Alpine-Linux-Install-21Oct2019

Results from nench.sh

-------------------------------------------------
nench.sh v2019.07.20 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
benchmark timestamp: 2019-10-21 06:08:07 UTC
-------------------------------------------------

Processor: QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.5+
CPU cores: 1
Frequency: 2526.998 MHz
RAM: BusyBox v1.30.1 (2019-06-12 17:51:55 UTC) multi-call binary.

Usage: free [-b/k/m/g]

Display the amount of free and used system memory
swapon: unrecognized option: s
BusyBox v1.30.1 (2019-06-12 17:51:55 UTC) multi-call binary.

Usage: swapon [-a] [-e] [-d[POL]] [-p PRI] [DEVICE]

Start swapping on DEVICE

-a Start swapping on all swap devices
-d[POL] Discard blocks at swapon (POL=once),
as freed (POL=pages), or both (POL omitted)
-e Silently skip devices that do not exist
-p PRI Set swap device priority
Swap: -
Kernel: Linux 4.19.80-0-vanilla x86_64

Disks:
df: unrecognized option: output=source,fstype,size,itotal
BusyBox v1.30.1 (2019-06-12 17:51:55 UTC) multi-call binary.

Usage: df [-PkmhTai] [-B SIZE] [FILESYSTEM]...

Print filesystem usage statistics

-P POSIX output format
-k 1024-byte blocks (default)
-m 1M-byte blocks
-h Human readable (e.g. 1K 243M 2G)
-T Print filesystem type
-a Show all filesystems
-i Inodes
-B SIZE Blocksize

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
0.002 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
0.002 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
0.011 seconds

ioping: seek rate
min/avg/max/mdev = 464.1 us / 2.22 ms / 564.2 ms / 28.6 ms
ioping: sequential read speed
generated 1.87 k requests in 5.00 s, 468.5 MiB, 374 iops, 93.7 MiB/s

dd: sequential write speed

 IPv4 speedtests your 
IPv4: 97.113.xx.xxxx 
Cachefly CDN: 2.92 MiB/s 
Leaseweb (NL): 0.36 MiB/s 
Softlayer DAL (US): 0.99 MiB/s 
Online.net (FR): 0.42 MiB/s 
OVH BHS (CA): 0.74 MiB/s

Results from bench.sh

freebox:~$ sudo curl -LsO 
noreferrer">

## CDN Speedtest

CacheFly : 2.65 MiB/s | 21.17 Mbps | ping error!
Gdrive : 2.17 MiB/s | 17.33 Mbps | ping error!

## IO Test

CPU Speed:
bzip2 512MB - 0
sha256 512MB - 0
md5sum 512MB - 0

Disk Speed (512MB):
I/O Speed -2048+0 records out
I/O Direct -dd: invalid argument 'dsync' to 'oflag'

RAM Speed (58MB):
Avg. write - 116.0 MB/s
Avg. read - 116.0 MB/s

Benchmark finished in 151 seconds
results saved on /root/bench.log

This post was updated on 12 Fe ’23