C5 instances: fast… and then some

In a previous post, I used the largest i3 instance to build FreeBSD 11 in 10 minutes and 54 seconds.

i3.16xlarge instance, 64 vCPUs, 488GB RAM, 8x1900GB local NVMe storage, 20Gb networking

This was a massive improvement over the i2 family, thanks to super-fast NVMe storage. Now that the c5 family is available, let’s see if we can do even better :)

C5, the ultimate face rippin’ experience

The C5 family

As usual, c5 instances come in different sizes.

Let’s pick the largest one and see how the new Intel Skylake architecture performs. For storage, we’ll use a 100GB EBS SSD volume with 5,000 IOPS.

Building FreeBSD

We’ve done this a few times already, here are the commands. Let’s start 4 threads per vCPU, hopefully this will be enough to keep them busy.

8 minutes and 30 seconds. Holy hell. 21% faster than i3. For reference, the same test on the largest c4 (c4.8xlarge) takes 11 minutes and 32 seconds. The c5 instance is 26% faster in this case.

Thanks for reading and happy testing.

This post was written in 15 minutes in London. Both far beyond the sun and at full speed, then. Yngwie-style \m/

About the Author

Julien Simon is the Chief Evangelist at Arcee AI , specializing in Small Language Models and enterprise AI solutions. Recognized as the #1 AI Evangelist globally by AI Magazine in 2021, he brings over 30 years of technology leadership experience to his role.

With 650+ speaking engagements worldwide and 350+ technical blog posts, Julien is a leading voice in practical AI implementation, cost-effective AI solutions, and the democratization of artificial intelligence. His expertise spans open-source AI, Small Language Models, enterprise AI strategy, and edge computing optimization.

Previously serving as Principal Evangelist at AWS and Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face, Julien has authored books on Amazon SageMaker and contributed to the open-source AI ecosystem. His mission is to make AI accessible, understandable, and controllable for everyone.