New Zealand’s biggest Odoo consultancy, Wedoo, benchmarked our High Performance servers against AWS, to see which setup handles the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system best. The results were conclusive, and didn’t surprise us.
Challenges of running enterprise systems
For companies using an ERP system, it's often the linchpin of day-to-day business activities. That’s why it’s important to get ERP software running as fast as possible. A snappy and responsive experience is just as dependent on the underlying server infrastructure as it is on the software itself.
Odoo is one of the most customisable ERP options on the market. Its expansive functionality and flexibility also makes it a heavily CPU-bound application. In practice, Odoo is best suited for running on servers with fast CPUs. If Odoo feels slow, adding more CPU cores is unlikely to help. Alternatively, faster CPUs will reduce time spent waiting for dashboards to load and reports to run, and increase a team’s productivity.
Teams spending lots of time in Odoo will be making thousands of clicks per day. It soon adds up when Odoo responds faster every time.
Wedoo does Odoo, and they’re very good at it
Day-to-day Wedoo customises and fine-tunes Odoo for their clients, ranging from companies with five people to teams with over 300 users.
Odoo is renowned for its user friendliness and customisability. From a technical perspective, however, customising Odoo can be quite complex. When we talked with Wedoo director Andrew Telfer last year, he said that the average custom Odoo implementation job takes about six months. Bigger jobs can take over a year.
Customising Odoo makes it more useful and critical to the company using it, but it also adds to the overall code base and increases the required computing power.
The “default choice” myth
Wedoo’s clients have worked with all sorts of hosting solutions. From hosting in a private cloud with SiteHost, spinning up AWS instances, running dedicated hardware, or using Odoo’s Odoo.sh service, they’ve pretty much tried it all.
Despite all these options, their clients sometimes have the preconceived idea that AWS is the standard, or default choice. As it turns out, AWS often isn’t the best way to host Odoo. But it’s one thing saying that, and another thing proving it.
AWS makes it easy to pay a premium price for average performance.
Wedoo’s customers wanted data on the best way to host Odoo in New Zealand. When Wedoo reached out to us about doing testing, we were happy to provide them with a High Performance Virtual Server to benchmark.
What was tested, and how it was tested
Wedoo designed a set of tests measuring a server’s efficiency at processing Odoo user actions. The tests cleverly isolated the latency of individual requests like report printing and validating invoices. It’s an incredibly accurate way of measuring the “speediness” of an Odoo user experience.
The tests pitted a SiteHost High Performance Virtual Server (running on a Ryzen 9 9950X) against an AWS t3.2xlarge instance (running an Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 CPU). Both servers ran eight CPU cores, and were both packed with 32GB RAM.
Across the three simulated clients, SiteHost’s High Performance server clocked faster times than AWS on every test.
It’s probably not surprising to most people reading this, but deployments (Odoo or otherwise) with more code and more data run more slowly than smaller setups. So Wedoo simulated three different types of clients, based on their experience implementing Odoo, to reflect realistic scenarios.
A small client with ~10 users, ~10k lines of (custom) code, and a ~1GB database
A mid-size client with ~25 users, ~20k lines of code, and a ~10GB database
A large client, with ~150 users, ~100k lines of code, and a 75GB database
True high performance
Wedoo ran 14 latency benchmarking tests for each of the three client types, on each server (that’s 42 tests per server).
They measured the latency between users clicking a button, and the results appearing on their screens.
The tests consisted of everyday Odoo user interactions, including: checking balances on accounting modules, loading invoicing, billing, purchasing and sales forms, and more. It’s the most realistic way to simulate how Odoo is used day-to-day.
Latency is measured in response time, so the scores are like golf—lower is better.
Across the board
The tests showed a noteworthy gap between the two servers. Across the three simulated clients, SiteHost’s High Performance server clocked faster times than AWS on every test.
You can check out the full stats here if you like graphs and data. Some highlights that stuck out to us were:
With the small client benchmarks, AWS latency more than doubled that of the High Performance server on every test.
Response times were twice as slow for AWS in all but one of the medium client tests.
Multiple tests on the large client took AWS over 12 seconds to respond. High Performance didn’t even take half that time on the most heavy interactions.
SiteHost’s High Performance server was faster on every test across the three different Odoo clients.
Latency adds up quickly and costs a lot of time. Wedoo’s benchmarks prove that SiteHost High Performance servers load significantly quicker in every test.
Old hardware, old results
Since we’re talking about servers here, the actual hardware inside is quite important.
In Wedoo’s benchmark testing, they used AWS’s t3.2xlarge instance because that’s typically where Odoo is installed when clients choose to host on AWS.
It’s been 6-7 years since the last hardware upgrades for any AWS’s T instances, large or otherwise. Whether you’re in charge of your company’s tech stack, or you’re a team member working with Odoo every day, you won’t want your ERP system to be running on old gear.
And let's face it, running apps on AWS won’t necessarily be cheaper either—Amazon themselves said as much when they admitted in 2024 that their customers often find it appealing to leave AWS.
As Dave Sparks of Sparks Interactive told us: "AWS is not a completely bad option. But I think within the first six months, the monthly cost tripled without our workload necessarily tripling. It showed that there was a cost to that growth. We were working so much harder, doing so much more. So why was the bottom line not joining us on that journey of joy?"
This sums up the message that Wedoo wants its customers to hear: AWS makes it easy to pay a premium price for average performance.
Don’t waste your team’s time
Two things can simultaneously be true. Yes, AWS servers are showing their age. It’s also true that the High Performance Virtual Servers at SiteHost run at breakneck speeds. That reduces frustration, and increases productivity.
Active Print, a happy Wedoo customer, said that since they’ve started running Odoo on SiteHost servers they’ve been saving a lot of time.
“We can respond quicker and more accurately to customer requests,” said managing director Alvin Lawry, when we chatted last year.
“With Odoo, customer orders are pulled into the orders system from the quote and from the product database. In the past we had to rekey all that information. Now when we produce a customer invoice, all the data is there. When we produce a purchase order to the supplier, all the data is there.”
If you’ve got a whole team relying on an ERP system, you don’t want that toolset to chug slowly and burn your team’s valuable time.
Want the best results?
It’s not just ERP software that can benefit from SiteHost’s High Performance Virtual Servers. Any app or website is limited by the hardware in the servers it’s running on. Don’t just settle for slow outdated hardware because it’s what you’ve been told everyone else is doing.
Take a look at the test results now, or get in touch if you want similar results to Wedoo.