19 June 2018
0 comments
MacOSX,
Web development,
Linux
tl;dr; ripgrep (aka. rg) is the best tool to grep today.
ripgrep is a tool for searching files. Its killer feature is that it's fast. Like, really really fast. Faster than sift, git grep, ack, regular grep etc.
If you don't believe me, either read this detailed blog post from its author or just jump straight to the conclusion:
-
For both searching single files and huge directories of files, no other tool obviously stands above ripgrep in either performance or correctness.
-
ripgrep is the only tool with proper Unicode support that doesn’t make you pay dearly for it.
-
Tools that search many files at once are generally slower if they use memory maps, not faster.
Benchmark
I used to use git grep whenever I was inside a git repo and sift for everything else. That alone, was a huge step up from regular grep. Granted, almost all my git repos are small enough that regular git grep is faster than I can perceive many times. But with ripgrep I can just add --no-ignore-vcs and it searches in all the files mentioned in .gitignore too. That's useful when you want to search in your own source as well as the files in node_modules.
The installation instructions are easy. I installed it with brew install ripgrep and the best way to learn how to use it is rg --help. Remember that it has a lot of cool features that are well worth learning. It's written in Rust and so far I haven't had a single crash, ever. The ability to search by file type gets some getting used to (tip! use: rg --type-list) and remember that you can pipe rg output to another rg. For example, to search for all lines that contain query and string you can use rg query | rg string.
14 June 2018
0 comments
MacOSX,
Linux
I use Oh My Zsh and I highly recommend it. However, it sets some aliases that I don't want. In particular, there's a plugin called git.plugin.zsh (located in ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/git/git.plugin.zsh) that interfers with a global binary I have in $PATH. So when I start a shell the executable gg becomes...:
▶ which gg
gg: aliased to git gui citool
That overrides /usr/local/bin/gg which is the one I want to execute when I type gg. To unset that I can run...:
▶ unset gg
▶ which gg
/usr/local/bin/gg
To override it "permanently", I added, to the end of ~/.zshrc:
# This unsets ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/git/git.plugin.zsh
# So my /usr/local/bin/gg works instead
unalias gg
Now whenever I start a new terminal, it defaults to the gg in /usr/local/bin/gg instead.
11 June 2018
2 comments
Web development,
Linux
First of all, you can't start two servers on the same port. Ultimately it will fail. However, you might not want a late notice of this. For example, if you do this:
# In one terminal
$ cd elasticsearch-6.1.0
$ ./bin/elasticsearch
...
$ curl localhost:9200
...
"version" : {
"number" : "6.1.0",
...
# In *another* terminal
$ cd elasticsearch-6.2.4
$ ./bin/elasticsearch
...
$ curl localhost:9200
...
"version" : {
"number" : "6.1.0",
...
In other words, what happened to the elasticsearch-6.2.4/bin/elasticsearch?? It actually started on port :9201. But that's a rather scary thing because as you jump between project in different tabs or you might not notice that you have Elasticsearch running with docker-compose somewhere.
To remedy this I use this curl one-liner:
$ curl -s localhost:9200 > /dev/null && echo "Already running!" && exit || ./bin/elasticsearch
Now if you try to start a server on a used port it will exit early.
To wrap this up in a script, take this:
#!/bin/bash
set -eo pipefail
hostandport=$1
shift
curl -s "$hostandport" >/dev/null && \
echo "Already running on $hostandport" && \
exit 1 || exec "$@"
...and make it an executable called unlessalready.sh and now you can do this:
$ unlessalready.sh localhost:9200 ./bin/elasticsearch
09 May 2018
0 comments
Linux
I wanted to install a command line tool called gg. But for some reason, gg was already tied to an alias. No problem, I'll just delete that alias. I looked in ~/.bash_profile and I looked in ~/.zshrc and it wasn't there!
But here's how I managed to figure out where it came from:
▶ which gg
gg: aliased to git gui citool
Then I copied the git gui citool part of that output and ran:
▶ rg --hidden 'git gui citool'
.oh-my-zsh/plugins/git/git.plugin.zsh
104:alias gg='git gui citool'
105:alias gga='git gui citool --amend'
A ha! So it was .oh-my-zsh/plugins/git/git.plugin.zsh that was the culprit. Totally forgot about the plugin. It's full of other useful aliases so I just commented out the one(s) I knew I don't need any more.
By the way rg, aka. ripgrep is probably one of the best tools I have. I use it so often that it's attached to my belt rather than in my toolbox.
02 May 2018
0 comments
Javascript,
MacOSX,
Linux
To me, using top inside a Linux server via SSH is all muscle-memory and it's definitely good enough. On my Macbook when working on some long-running code that is resource intensive the best tool I know of is: gtop
gtop in action
I like it because it has the graphs I want and need. It splits up the work of each CPU which is awesome. That's useful for understanding how well a program is able to leverage more than one CPU process.
And it's really nice to have the list of Processes there to be able to quickly compare which programs are running and how that might affect the use of the CPUs.
Instead of listing alternatives I've tried before, hopefully this Reddit discussion has good links to other alternatives
13 February 2018
0 comments
Linux
I often use this in various projects. I find it very useful. Thought I'd share to see if others find it useful.
Running something forever
Suppose you have some command that you want to run a lot. One way is to do this:
$ ./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command && \
./manage.py run-some-command
That runs the command 10 times. Clunky but effective.
Another alternative is to hijack the watch command. By default it waits 2 seconds between each run but if the command takes longer than 2 seconds, it'll just wait. Running...
$ watch ./manage.py run-some-command
Is almost the same as running...:
$ clear && sleep 2 && ./manage.py run-some-command && \
clear && sleep 2 && ./manage.py run-some-command && \
clear && sleep 2 && ./manage.py run-some-command && \
clear && sleep 2 && ./manage.py run-some-command && \
clear && sleep 2 && ./manage.py run-some-command && \
clear && sleep 2 && ./manage.py run-some-command && \
...
...forever until you Ctrl-C it...
But that's clunky too because you might not want it to clear the screen between each run and you get an un-necessary delay between each run.
The biggest problem is that with using watch or copy-n-paste the command many times with && between is that if you need to stop it you have to Ctrl-C and that might kill the command at a precious time.
A better solution
The important thing is that if you want to stop the command repeater, is that it gets to finish what it's working on at the moment.
Here's a great and simple solution:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eo pipefail
_stopnow() {
test -f stopnow && echo "Stopping!" && rm stopnow && exit 0 || return 0
}
while true
do
_stopnow
# Below here, you put in your command you want to run:
./manage.py run-some-command
done
Save that file as run-forever.sh and now you can do this:
$ bash run-forever.sh
It'll sit there and do its thing over and over. If you want to stop it (from another terminal):
$ touch stopnow
(the file stopnow will be deleted after it's spotted once)
Getting fancy
Instead of taking this bash script and editing it every time you need it to run a different command you can make it a globally available command. Here's how I do it:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eo pipefail
count=0
_stopnow() {
count="$(($count+1))"
test -f stopnow && \
echo "Stopping after $count iterations!" && \
rm stopnow && exit 0 || return 0
}
control_c()
# run if user hits control-c
{
echo "Managed to do $count iterations"
exit $?
}
# trap keyboard interrupt (control-c)
trap control_c SIGINT
echo "To stop this forever loop created a file called stopnow."
echo "E.g: touch stopnow"
echo ""
echo "Now going to run '$@' forever"
echo ""
while true
do
_stopnow
eval $@
# Do this in case you accidentally pass an argument
# that finishes too quickly.
sleep 1
done
This code in a Gist here.
Put this file in ~/bin/run-forever.sh and chmod +x ~/bin/run-forever.sh.
Now you can do this:
$ run-forever.sh ./manage.py run-some-command
If the command you want to run, forever, requires an operator you have to wrap everything in single quotation marks. For example:
$ run-forever.sh './manage.py run-some-command && echo "Cooling CPUs..." && sleep 10'
11 February 2018
2 comments
Nginx,
Web development,
Linux
tl;dr; When you use add_header in a location block in Nginx, it undoes all "parent" add_header directives. Dangerous!
Gist of the problem is this:
There could be several add_header directives. These directives are inherited from the previous level if and only if there are no add_header directives defined on the current level.
From the documentation on add_header
The grand but subtle mistake
Basically, I had this:
server {
server_name example.com;
...gzip...
...ssl...
...root...
# Great security headers...
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
...more security headers...
location / {
try_files $uri /index.html;
}
}
And when you curl it, you can see that it works:
$ curl -I https://example.com
[snip]
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains; preload
The mistake I had, was that I added a new add_header inside a relevant location block. If you do that, all the other "global" add_headers are dropped.
E.g.
server {
server_name example.com;
...gzip...
...ssl...
...root...
# Great security headers...
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
...more security headers...
location / {
try_files $uri /index.html;
# NOTE! Adding some more headers here
+ add_header X-debug-whats-going-on on;
}
}
Now, same curl command:
$ curl -I https://example.com
[snip]
X-debug-whats-going-on: on
Yikes! Now those other useful security headers are gone!
Here are your options:
- Don't add headers like that inside
location blocks. Yeah, that's not always a choice.
- Copy-n-paste all the general security
add_header blocks into the location blocks where you have to have "custom" add_header entries.
- Use an include file, see below.
How to include files
First create a new file, like /etc/nginx/snippets/general-security-headers.conf then put this into it:
# Great security headers...
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
...more security headers...
# More realistically, see https://gist.github.com/plentz/6737338
Now, instead of saying these add_header lines in your /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.conf change that to:
server {
server_name example.com;
...gzip...
...ssl...
...root...
include /etc/nginx/snippets/general-security-headers.conf;
location / {
try_files $uri /index.html;
# Note! This gets included *again* because
# this location block needs its own custom add_header
# directives.
include /etc/nginx/snippets/general-security-headers.conf;
# NOTE! Adding some more headers here
add_header X-debug-whats-going-on on;
}
}
(You need to use your imagination that a real Nginx config site probably has many different more complex location directives)
It's arguably a bit clunky but it works and it's the best of both worlds. The right security headers for all locations and ability to set custom add_header directives for specific locations.
Discussion
I'm most disappointed in myself for not noticing. Not for not noticing this in the Nginx documentation, but that I didn't check my security headers on more than one path. But I'm also quite disappointed in Nginx for this rather odd behaviour. To quote my security engineer at Mozilla, April King:
"add" doesn't usually mean "subtract everything else"
She agreed with me that the way it works is counter-intuitive and showed me this snippet which uses include files the same way.
29 January 2018
0 comments
MacOSX,
Linux
Problem
I used to have a bunch of domains in /etc/hosts like peterbecom.dev for testing Nginx configurations locally. But then it became impossible to test local sites in Chrome because an .dev is force redirected to HTTPS. No problem, so I use .local instead. However, DNS resolution was horribly slow. For example:
▶ time curl -I http://peterbecom.local/about/minimal.css > /dev/null
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 1763 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- 0:00:05 --:--:-- 0
curl -I http://peterbecom.local/about/minimal.css > /dev/null 0.01s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 5.585 total
5.6 seconds to open a local file in Nginx.
Solution
Here's that one weird trick to solve it: Add an entry for IPv4 AND IPv6 in /etc/hosts.
So now I have:
▶ cat /etc/hosts | grep peterbecom
127.0.0.1 peterbecom.local
::1 peterbecom.local
Verification
Ah! Much better. Thing are fast again:
▶ time curl -I http://peterbecom.local/about/minimal.css > /dev/null
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 1763 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
curl -I http://peterbecom.local/about/minimal.css > /dev/null 0.01s user 0.01s system 37% cpu 0.041 total
0.04 seconds instead of 5.6.
03 January 2018
1 comment
MacOSX,
Linux
Every now and then, I take a video with my iPhone and even though I hold the camera in landscape mode, the video gets recorded in portrait mode. Probably because it somehow started in portrait and didn't notice that I rotated the phone.
So I'm stuck with a 90° video. Here's how I rotate it:
ffmpeg -i thatvideo.mov -vf "transpose=2" ~/Desktop/thatvideo.mov
then I check that ~/Desktop/thatvideo.mov looks like it should.
I can't remember where I got this command originally but I've been relying on my bash history for a looong time so it's best to write this down.
The "transpose=2" means 90° counter clockwise. "transpose=1" means 90° clockwise.
What is ffmpeg??
If you're here because you Googled it and you don't know what ffmpeg is, it's a command line program where you can "programmatically" do almost anything to videos such as conversion between formats, put text in, chop and trim videos. To install it, install Homebrew then type:
brew install ffmpeg
29 November 2017
18 comments
Go,
Mozilla,
Linux,
Python
This web app I'm working on gets a blob of bytes from a HTTP POST. The nature of the blob is a 100MB to 1,100MB blob of a zip file. What my app currently does is that it takes this byte buffer, uses Python's built in zipfile to extract all its content to a temporary directory. A second function then loops over the files within this extracted tree and processes each file in multiple threads with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor. Here's the core function itself:
@metrics.timer_decorator('upload_dump_and_extract')
def dump_and_extract(root_dir, file_buffer):
zf = zipfile.ZipFile(file_buffer)
zf.extractall(root_dir)
So far so good.
Speed Speed Speed
I quickly noticed that this is amounting to quite a lot of time spent doing the unzip and the writing to disk. What to do????
At first I thought I'd shell out to good old unzip. E.g. unzip -d /tmp/tempdirextract /tmp/input.zip but that has two flaws:
1) I'd first have to dump the blob of bytes to disk and do the overhead of shelling out (i.e. Python subprocess)
2) It's actually not faster. Did some experimenting and got the same results at Alex Martelli in this Stackoverflow post
What about disk speed? Yeah, this is likely to be a part of the total time. The servers that run the symbols.mozilla.org service runs on AWS EC2 c4.large. This only has EBS (Elastic Block Storage). However, AWS EC2 c3.large looks interesting since it's using SSD disks. That's probably a lot faster. Right?
Note! For context, the kind of .zip files I'm dealing with contain many small files and often 1-2 really large ones.
EC2s Benchmarking
I create two EC2 nodes to experiment on. One c3.large and one c4.large. Both running Ubuntu 16.04.
Next, I have this little benchmarking script which loops over a directory full of .zip files between 200MB-600MB large. Roughly 10 of them. It then loads each one, one at a time, into memory and calls the dump_and_extract. Let's run it on each EC2 instance:
On c4.large
c4.large$ python3 fastest-dumper.py /tmp/massive-symbol-zips
138.2MB/s 291.1MB 2.107s
146.8MB/s 314.5MB 2.142s
144.8MB/s 288.2MB 1.990s
84.5MB/s 532.4MB 6.302s
146.6MB/s 314.2MB 2.144s
136.5MB/s 270.7MB 1.984s
85.9MB/s 518.9MB 6.041s
145.2MB/s 306.8MB 2.113s
127.8MB/s 138.7MB 1.085s
107.3MB/s 454.8MB 4.239s
141.6MB/s 251.2MB 1.774s
Average speed: 127.7MB/s
Median speed: 138.2MB/s
Average files created: 165
Average directories created: 129
On c3.large
c3.large$ python3 fastest-dumper.py -t /mnt/extracthere /tmp/massive-symbol-zips
105.4MB/s 290.9MB 2.761s
98.1MB/s 518.5MB 5.287s
108.1MB/s 251.2MB 2.324s
112.5MB/s 294.3MB 2.615s
113.7MB/s 314.5MB 2.767s
106.3MB/s 291.5MB 2.742s
104.8MB/s 291.1MB 2.778s
114.6MB/s 248.3MB 2.166s
114.2MB/s 248.2MB 2.173s
105.6MB/s 298.1MB 2.823s
106.2MB/s 297.6MB 2.801s
98.6MB/s 521.4MB 5.289s
Average speed: 107.3MB/s
Median speed: 106.3MB/s
Average files created: 165
Average directories created: 127
What the heck!? The SSD based instance is 23% slower!
I ran it a bunch of times and the average and median numbers are steady. c4.large is faster than c3.large at unzipping large blobs to disk. So much for that SSD!
Something Weird Is Going On
It's highly likely that the unzipping work is CPU bound and that most of those, for example, 5 seconds is spent unzipping and only a small margin is the time it takes to write to disk.
If the unzipping CPU work is the dominant "time consumer" why is there a difference at all?!
Or, is the "compute power" the difference between c3 and c4 and disk writes immaterial?
For the record, this test clearly demonstrates that the locally mounted SSD drive is 600% faster than ESB.
c3.large$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/1gbtest bs=16k count=65536
65536+0 records in
65536+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 16.093 s, 66.7 MB/s
c3.large$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/1gbtest bs=16k count=65536
65536+0 records in
65536+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 2.62728 s, 409 MB/s
Let's try again. But instead of using c4.large and c3.large, let's use the beefier c4.4xlarge and c3.4xlarge. Both have 16 vCPUs.
c4.4xlarge
c4.4xlarge$ python3 fastest-dumper.py /tmp/massive-symbol-zips
130.6MB/s 553.6MB 4.238s
149.2MB/s 297.0MB 1.991s
129.1MB/s 529.8MB 4.103s
116.8MB/s 407.1MB 3.486s
147.3MB/s 306.1MB 2.077s
151.9MB/s 248.2MB 1.634s
140.8MB/s 292.3MB 2.076s
146.8MB/s 288.0MB 1.961s
142.2MB/s 321.0MB 2.257s
Average speed: 139.4MB/s
Median speed: 142.2MB/s
Average files created: 148
Average directories created: 117
c3.4xlarge
c3.4xlarge$ python3 fastest-dumper.py -t /mnt/extracthere /tmp/massive-symbol-zips
95.1MB/s 502.4MB 5.285s
104.1MB/s 303.5MB 2.916s
115.5MB/s 313.9MB 2.718s
105.5MB/s 517.4MB 4.904s
114.1MB/s 288.1MB 2.526s
103.3MB/s 555.9MB 5.383s
114.0MB/s 288.0MB 2.526s
109.2MB/s 251.2MB 2.300s
108.0MB/s 291.0MB 2.693s
Average speed: 107.6MB/s
Median speed: 108.0MB/s
Average files created: 150
Average directories created: 119
What's going on!? The time it takes to unzip and write to disk is, on average, the same for c3.large as c3.4xlarge!
Is Go Any Faster?
I need a break. As mentioned above, the unzip command line program is not any better than doing it in Python. But Go is faster right? Right?
Please first accept that I'm not a Go programmer even though I can use it to build stuff but really my experience level is quite shallow.
Here's the Go version. Critical function that does the unzipping and extraction to disk here:
func DumpAndExtract(dest string, buffer []byte, name string) {
size := int64(len(buffer))
zipReader, err := zip.NewReader(bytes.NewReader(buffer), size)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
for _, f := range zipReader.File {
rc, err := f.Open()
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
defer rc.Close()
fpath := filepath.Join(dest, f.Name)
if f.FileInfo().IsDir() {
os.MkdirAll(fpath, os.ModePerm)
} else {
// Make File
var fdir string
if lastIndex := strings.LastIndex(fpath, string(os.PathSeparator)); lastIndex > -1 {
fdir = fpath[:lastIndex]
}
err = os.MkdirAll(fdir, os.ModePerm)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
f, err := os.OpenFile(
fpath, os.O_WRONLY|os.O_CREATE|os.O_TRUNC, f.Mode())
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
defer f.Close()
_, err = io.Copy(f, rc)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
}
}
}
And the measurement is done like this:
size := int64(len(content))
t0 := time.Now()
DumpAndExtract(tmpdir, content, filename)
t1 := time.Now()
speed := float64(size) / t1.Sub(t0).Seconds()
It's not as sophisticated (since it's only able to use /tmp) but let's just run it see how it compares to Python:
c4.4xlarge$ mkdir ~/GO
c4.4xlarge$ export GOPATH=~/GO
c4.4xlarge$ go get github.com/pyk/byten
c4.4xlarge$ go build unzips.go
c4.4xlarge$ ./unzips /tmp/massive-symbol-zips
56MB/s 407MB 7.27804954
74MB/s 321MB 4.311504933
75MB/s 288MB 3.856798853
75MB/s 292MB 3.90972474
81MB/s 248MB 3.052652168
58MB/s 530MB 9.065985117
59MB/s 554MB 9.35237202
75MB/s 297MB 3.943132388
74MB/s 306MB 4.147176578
Average speed: 70MB/s
Median speed: 81MB/s
So... Go is, on average, 40% slower than Python in this scenario. Did not expect that.
In Conclusion
No conclusion. Only confusion.
I thought this would be a lot clearer and more obvious. Yeah, I know it's crazy to measure two things at the same time (unzip and disk write) but the whole thing started with a very realistic problem that I'm trying to solve. The ultimate question was; will the performance benefit from us moving the web servers from AWS EC2 c4.large to c3.large and I think the answer is no.
UPDATE (Nov 30, 2017)
Here's a horrible hack that causes the extraction to always go to /dev/null:
class DevNullZipFile(zipfile.ZipFile):
def _extract_member(self, member, targetpath, pwd):
# member.is_dir() only works in Python 3.6
if member.filename[-1] == '/':
return targetpath
dest = '/dev/null'
with self.open(member, pwd=pwd) as source, open(dest, "wb") as target:
shutil.copyfileobj(source, target)
return targetpath
def dump_and_extract(root_dir, file_buffer, klass):
zf = klass(file_buffer)
zf.extractall(root_dir)
And here's the outcome of running that:
c4.4xlarge$ python3 fastest-dumper.py --dev-null /tmp/massive-symbol-zips
170.1MB/s 297.0MB 1.746s
168.6MB/s 306.1MB 1.815s
147.1MB/s 553.6MB 3.765s
132.1MB/s 407.1MB 3.083s
145.6MB/s 529.8MB 3.639s
175.4MB/s 248.2MB 1.415s
163.3MB/s 321.0MB 1.965s
162.1MB/s 292.3MB 1.803s
168.5MB/s 288.0MB 1.709s
Average speed: 159.2MB/s
Median speed: 163.3MB/s
Average files created: 0
Average directories created: 0
I ran it a few times to make sure the numbers are stable. They are. This is on the c4.4xlarge.
So, the improvement of writing to /dev/null instead of the ESB /tmp is 15%. Kinda goes to show how much of the total time is spent reading the ZipInfo file object.
For the record, the same comparison on the c3.4xlarge was 30% improvement when using /dev/null.
Also for the record, if I replace that line shutil.copyfileobj(source, target) above with pass, the average speed goes from 159.2MB/s to 112.8GB/s but that's not a real value of any kind.
UPDATE (Nov 30, 2017)
Here's the same benchmark using c5.4xlarge instead. So, still EBS but...
"3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum processors with new Intel Advanced Vector Extension 512 (AVX-512) instruction set"
Let's run it on this supposedly faster CPU:
c5.4xlarge$ python3 fastest-dumper.py /tmp/massive-symbol-zips
165.6MB/s 314.6MB 1.900s
163.3MB/s 287.7MB 1.762s
155.2MB/s 278.6MB 1.795s
140.9MB/s 513.2MB 3.643s
137.4MB/s 556.9MB 4.052s
134.6MB/s 531.0MB 3.946s
165.7MB/s 314.2MB 1.897s
158.1MB/s 301.5MB 1.907s
151.6MB/s 253.8MB 1.674s
146.9MB/s 502.7MB 3.422s
163.7MB/s 288.0MB 1.759s
Average speed: 153.0MB/s
Median speed: 155.2MB/s
Average files created: 150
Average directories created: 119
So that is, on average, 10% faster than c4.4xlarge.
Is it 10% more expensive? For a 1-year reserved instance, it's $0.796 versus $0.68 respectively. I.e. 15% more expensive. In other words, in this context it's 15% more $$$ for 10% more processing power.
UPDATE (Jan 24, 2018)
I can almost not believe it!
Thanks you Oliver who discovered (see comment below) a blaring mistake in my last conclusion. The for reserved instances (which is what we use on my Mozilla production servers) the c5.4xlarge is actually cheaper than c4.4xlarge. What?!
In my previous update I compared c4.4xlarge and c5.4xlarge and concluded that c5.4xlarge is 10% faster but 15% more expensive. That actually made sense. Fancier servers, more $$$. But it's not like that in the real world. See for yourself:
c4.4xlarge
c5.4xlarge
