Our site has been running slow recently and I've noticed that the RDS write IOPS can go as high as 80/sec and as low as 9/sec.
Is this something that could be causing pages to load slowly? If so what could be causing it. Our RDS is a db.m3.large with 7.5 GiB memory and 100 GB SSD storage. On average we have about 2 people using our application at once, 5 max often just 1.
Sorry if I'm not giving enough info, I'm very new to systems admin.
Best Answer
How long is a piece of string?
That's an analogue of your question.
Regardless of what metric you're speaking about, it could be CPU usage, Disk IO, Network IO, RAM, etc...their values only matter to the extent that they affect your application.
So, if your current level of Disk IO is slowing down queries to the point where it's affecting your application, well then yes, you need to look into faster storage.
Determining whether or not your database layer is the root cause of your poor performance is another topic altogether.