DigitalOcean Premium AMD (1 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Regular (2 GB)

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Fresh benchmarks coming at ya. Today I spun up fresh instances from DigitalOcean to run some benchmarks on. All instances were spun up with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and were created in the New York area (or close to it). Enough talk. Here's the data.

Overview

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:37:21 GMT Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:31:21 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 7.0.0-27-generic 7.0.0-27-generic
MySQL Version 8.4.10-0ubuntu0.26.04.1 8.4.10-0ubuntu0.26.04.1
Redis Version 8.0.5 8.0.5
Location New York, NY New York, NY
Monthly Price $7.00 $12.00
RAM (GB) 1 2
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 25 50
Storage Type NVMe SSD
Transfer (TB) 1 2

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

CategoryWinner
CPU (events/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB)
Memory (read MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB)
Disk I/O (MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
MySQL (read/write tps)DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Redis (GET/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB)
Value (CPU events per $/mo)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB)

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) takes 4 of 6 categories.

CPU

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Vendor AuthenticAMD GenuineIntel
Model Name DO-Premium-AMD DO-Regular
Clock Speed (MHz) 1,996.25 2,494.14
CPU Cache Size (KB) 512.00 4,096.00
BogoMips 3,992.49 4,988.28
Events per Second 1,270.29 411.59
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.66 0.99
Average Latency (ms) 0.79 2.42
Maximum Latency (ms) 16.91 19.9
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.87 3.96

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Operations per second 4,259,692.62 4,123,717.02
Mebibytes per second 4,159.86 4,027.07
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 2.04 0.54
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Operations per second 4,578,740.48 4,007,053.05
Mebibytes per second 4,471.43 3,913.14
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.32 1.82
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Reads per Second 1,043.48 2,758.95
Writes per Second 695.66 1,839.23
Fsyncs per Second 2,238.59 5,895.77
Read Mebibytes per Second 16.30 43.11
Written Mebibytes per Second 10.87 28.74
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.25 0.09
Maximum Latency (ms) 26.9 11.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.92 0.3

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 1,955.91 2,498.24
Average Latency (ms) 1,970.75 2,546.75
Maximum Latency (ms) 1,977.87 2,562.19
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1,973.38 2,585.31

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,004.00 5,626.00
Queries per second 60,040.00 56,260.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.22 1.18
Average Latency (ms) 1.66 1.77
Maximum Latency (ms) 352.46 3.44
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.96 2.39

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,993.00 4,813.00
Queries per second 29,930.00 48,130.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.31 0.92
Average Latency (ms) 3.34 2.07
Maximum Latency (ms) 34.24 29.26
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 6.91 3.19

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,677.00 1,931.00
Queries per second 16,770.00 19,310.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 3.14 2.94
Average Latency (ms) 5.96 5.17
Maximum Latency (ms) 81.28 17.66
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 10.84 7.17

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,786.00 6,585.00
Queries per second 67,860.00 65,850.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.79 0.56
Average Latency (ms) 1.47 1.51
Maximum Latency (ms) 23.78 11.88
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.57 2.71

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 931,337.00 833,039.00
Queries per second 9,313,370.00 8,330,390.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.01
Maximum Latency (ms) 1149.14 568.39
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 137,388.00 148,439.00
Queries per second 1,373,880.00 1,484,390.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.05 0.04
Average Latency (ms) 0.07 0.07
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.32 4.95
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.11 0.1

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 4,725.00 3,505.00
Queries per second 47,250.00 35,050.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.78 0.98
Average Latency (ms) 2.11 2.85
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.8 6.79
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.02 4.25

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 6,047.00 5,769.00
Queries per second 60,470.00 57,690.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.37 0.53
Average Latency (ms) 1.65 1.73
Maximum Latency (ms) 52.51 4.73
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.3 2.66

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 2,905.00 6,299.00
Queries per second 29,050.00 62,990.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.92 0.57
Average Latency (ms) 3.44 1.58
Maximum Latency (ms) 66.16 28.52
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 10.09 3.07

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,682.00 7,198.00
Queries per second 36,820.00 71,980.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.86 0.51
Average Latency (ms) 2.71 1.39
Maximum Latency (ms) 40.7 167.69
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 7.7 2.35

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
Transactions per second 38,236.00 33,426.00
Queries per second 382,360.00 334,260.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.05 0.04
Average Latency (ms) 0.26 0.3
Maximum Latency (ms) 20.01 22.19
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.61 1.61

Redis

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 56,850.48 34,188.04
PING_MBULK per Second 61,162.08 44,483.99
SET per Second 57,570.52 40,112.31
GET per Second 57,636.89 40,883.07
INCR per Second 59,772.86 39,729.84
LPUSH per Second 57,142.86 40,404.04
RPUSH per Second 56,369.79 37,397.16
LPOP per Second 59,488.40 37,257.82
RPOP per Second 59,488.40 36,114.12
SADD per Second 58,962.27 37,425.15
HSET per Second 44,984.25 38,759.69
SPOP per Second 57,077.62 45,641.26
ZADD per Second 58,548.01 42,283.30
ZPOPMIN per Second 60,240.96 47,438.33
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 30,854.68 23,089.36
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 14,740.57 12,169.89
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 10,568.59 8,394.19
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 8,655.01 6,932.89
MSET (10 keys) per Second 49,043.65 31,796.50

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (1 GB) DigitalOcean – Regular (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.560.94
PING_MBULK0.510.69
SET0.560.77
GET0.550.75
INCR0.530.78
LPUSH0.560.78
RPUSH0.570.84
LPOP0.540.85
RPOP0.540.87
SADD0.540.83
HSET0.790.81
SPOP0.550.68
ZADD0.550.74
ZPOPMIN0.520.65
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)1.111.40
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)2.312.63
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)3.103.62
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)3.654.24
MSET (10 keys)0.801.06

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The DigitalOcean Premium AMD (1 GB) instance edges out the Regular (2 GB) in terms of overall performance, especially in CPU-intensive tasks, as evidenced by the higher Redis RPS benchmarks like LPUSH (59772.86 RPS vs. 40404.04 RPS) and GET (57636.89 RPS vs. 40883.07 RPS). However, the Regular instance shows slightly better memory and I/O performance, which could be beneficial for memory-heavy or I/O-bound applications. Thus, the Premium AMD is preferred for CPU-heavy workloads while the Regular instance may be more suitable for applications that favor memory and I/O efficiency.

From the friendly human:

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