OVH b3-8 in five regions, same night — Frankfurt / London / Milan / Warsaw / Mumbai
Disclosure first: I resell OVH and DigitalOcean capacity, so I had the account open anyway. This isn't an ad — I'd like to keep the thread about the numbers.
I needed data for a few OVH regions and couldn't find anything recent for Milan or Mumbai, so I spun up the same instance in five regions on Saturday night and ran YABS on each.
Setup: b3-8 — 2 vCPU, 8 GB, 50 GB NVMe, 500 Mbit public port. AMD EPYC-Milan, KVM. Ubuntu 24.04 everywhere except Mumbai (26.04 — more on that at the bottom). One instance per region, one run each.
Geekbench 6
Region Single Multi Clock
Mumbai AP-SOUTH-MUM-1 1929 3504 3100 MHz
Milan EU-SOUTH-MIL 1858 3364 2400 MHz
Frankfurt DE1 1586 2477 2296 MHz
Warsaw WAW1 1478 2714 2445 MHz
London UK1 1160 2088 2445 MHz
London and Warsaw report the same clock, but London came out 27% lower on single core. Frankfurt has the lowest clock of the five and still beat London by 37%. I read that as host load rather than silicon — see the caveats at the end.
Disk — fio, mixed R/W 50/50
Region 4k total 64k total 512k 1m
Frankfurt 164.24 MB/s 40.0k 2.78 GB/s 42.4k 4.85 GB/s 5.04 GB/s
London 164.24 MB/s 40.0k 2.78 GB/s 42.4k 4.18 GB/s 4.36 GB/s
Milan 164.23 MB/s 40.0k 2.78 GB/s 42.4k 4.68 GB/s 4.96 GB/s
Warsaw 164.24 MB/s 40.0k 2.73 GB/s 41.7k 3.12 GB/s 3.12 GB/s
Mumbai 164.23 MB/s 40.0k 2.78 GB/s 42.4k 6.05 GB/s 6.83 GB/s
This is the part I found worth posting. The 4k column is identical to four significant figures in all five regions — three continents, two Ubuntu releases, two kernels. 64k is identical in four of the five. That isn't disk performance, that's a volume IOPS quota, and it sits at 40.0k.
Once the block size is large enough that 40k IOPS stops being the binding constraint, the regions separate properly: Mumbai 6.83 GB/s at 1m, Frankfurt 5.04, Warsaw 3.12.
Practical read: if your workload is small random I/O, the region you pick makes no difference on this plan. If it's large sequential, it makes a 2x difference.
Warsaw really is the slowest. I ran it twice, ten hours apart, second time after a reboot on a fresh kernel: 3.11 and 3.12 GB/s at 1m. Same CPU score both times too (1499, then 1478).
Network
Best iperf3 figure per region:
Region IPv4 best IPv6 best target
Frankfurt 489 Mbits/sec 482 Mbits/sec Amsterdam
London 489 Mbits/sec 484 Mbits/sec Amsterdam / London
Warsaw 487 Mbits/sec 480 Mbits/sec Amsterdam
Milan 487 Mbits/sec none London
Mumbai 430 Mbits/sec 417 Mbits/sec Amsterdam
The port is 500 Mbit and the European boxes sit at about 98% of it. IPv6 runs 1-2% behind IPv4, which is near enough to call identical.
Two things stood out.
Milan has no IPv6 at all. Not slow IPv6 — the instance comes up v4-only, YABS reports IPv6: Offline, and there's no v6 address in the control panel either. Milan is one of OVH's 3-AZ regions. I don't know yet whether that applies to the other 3-AZ regions or is specific to Milan; if anyone has a box in EU-WEST-PAR I'd be interested to hear.
Sending to Clouvider Los Angeles was asymmetric from every European region. 128-167 Mbit send against 429-443 recv, in all four European runs, on both v4 and v6. Receiving was fine. Mumbai didn't show it (334 send / 343 recv). Almost certainly a path thing rather than the instances, but it was consistent enough to mention.
Caveats, because they matter
One instance per region, one run each, except Warsaw. On shared infrastructure that measures a host at a moment, not a region. London's 1160 might be a busy neighbour rather than anything about UK1 — I'd want three or four boxes per region before saying "London is slow". Warsaw is the one result I'd stand behind, because it reproduced.
Mumbai ran Ubuntu 26.04 / kernel 7.0 while the rest were 24.04 / 6.8. Geekbench ships a prebuilt binary so I doubt it moved the CPU number much, but it's a difference and you should weigh it.
Raw YABS output, all five regions — six runs, Warsaw twice:
https://gist.github.com/vpnai2002/7f63df4a81da5a2c6a67dafbd35b028a
If there's an OVH region you want numbers from, say so and I'll run it — the account is open anyway.
Comments
Following up on the Milan IPv6 thing — I spun up a box in EU-WEST-PAR
(Paris, the other 3-AZ region) to check. Same result: IPv4 only, no v6
address in the panel at all.
So it looks like it's the 3-AZ regions rather than Milan specifically.
The 1-AZ regions I tested (DE1, UK1, WAW1) all had v6. Worth knowing
before you pick a region.
I don't know whether it's simply not provisioned by default there or
genuinely unavailable — if anyone knows, I'd like to hear it.