Cerberus has released a whitepaper that benchmarks its FTP Server performance on the popular AWS and Azure cloud platforms.
Cloud environments can spark many questions about performance and workload optimisation, even in 2020. Load testing can be one way to allay concerns. However, the whitepaper shows that, properly configured, and with sufficient network bandwidth, a single instance of Cerberus FTP Server 11 can handle the transfer of large files across many connections.
Cerberus conducted load testing on virtual servers in AWS and Azure clouds, both typical cloud platforms in the modern enterprise. One test ran 36 threads repeated 100 times by 10 AWS client servers and four laptops against an Azure server running Cerberus, from several IP addresses dispersed across the USA.
“Concurrent connections peaked at over 160 and usually ranged between 100-150 throughout the test. CPU usage of the AWS Cerberus server peaked at 62% but usually ranged between 50 – 55%,” the whitepaper confirmed. “CPU usage on each of the client servers was at or close to 100% throughout the test”
RAM usage on the AWS Cerberus server was low: it peaked at 105MB and was usually around 12 – 15% of total available
Testing involved a straightforward configuration that avoided the use of AD/LDAP user management, reporting to a database, hard disk storage, or network storage. The latter features can cause performance bottlenecks, and should be load-tested separately only if required.
“For extremely high-volume customers, we recommend load testing on more robust servers with as few limitations on the inbound network as possible in order to truly stress the product.”
Cerberus releases updates and fixes to FTP Server 11 around twice a month. The latest update on 15 July Report Manager included support for the PostgreSQL database.
PostgreSQL is an advanced open-source object-relational database that runs on the major operating systems and has useful add-ons such as the PostGIS geospatial database extender.
Cerberus FTP Server 11.2.5 also added a fix for file report generation in Report Manager when using SQL Server 2008 R2 as the database and for extension blocking and time display in Log Manager, and logoff event rules with email session report action can now deselect the default email server.
Download Cerberus FTP Server 11.2.5 in the latest 32-bit or 64-bit versions here.