Consul requires different amounts of compute resources, depending on cluster size and expected workload. This guide provides guidance on choosing compute resources.
---
# Server Performance
Since Consul servers run a [consensus protocol](/docs/internals/consensus.html) to
process all write operations and are contacted on nearly all read operations, server
performance is critical for overall throughput and health of a Consul cluster. Servers
are generally I/O bound for writes because the underlying Raft log store performs a sync
to disk every time an entry is appended. Servers are generally CPU bound for reads since
reads work from a fully in-memory data store that is optimized for concurrent access.
<aname="minimum"></a>
## Minimum Server Requirements
In Consul 0.7, the default server [performance parameters](/docs/agent/options.html#performance)
were tuned to allow Consul to run reliably (but relatively slowly) on a server cluster of three
[AWS t2.micro](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) instances. These thresholds
were determined empirically using a leader instance that was under sufficient read, write,
and network load to cause it to permanently be at zero CPU credits, forcing it to the baseline
performance mode for that instance type. Real-world workloads typically have more bursts of
activity, so this is a conservative and pessimistic tuning strategy.
This default was chosen based on feedback from users, many of whom wanted a low cost way
to run small production or development clusters with low cost compute resources, at the
expense of some performance in leader failure detection and leader election times.
The default performance configuration is equivalent to this:
```javascript
{
"performance": {
"raft_multiplier": 5
}
}
```
<aname="production"></a>
## Production Server Requirements
When running Consul 0.7 and later in production, it is recommended to configure the server
[performance parameters](/docs/agent/options.html#performance) back to Consul's original
high-performance settings. This will let Consul servers detect a failed leader and complete
leader elections much more quickly than the default configuration which extends key Raft
timeouts by a factor of 5, so it quite slow during these events.
The high performance configuration is simple and looks like this:
```javascript
{
"performance": {
"raft_multiplier": 1
}
}
```
It's best to benchmark with a realistic workload when choosing a production server for Consul.
