This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: [OT] The $64K question/server hardware From: ___cliff rayman___ <cliff@genwax.com> Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 14:32:52 -0700 Bill Moseley wrote: > Hi, > > I'm not sure why, but someone asked me to review a bid they received for a > server to run their site. That's where the $64,000 USD part comes from. > Whew! > > This is not a commerce site (it's a .org), and unlikely to get slashdotted. > 24/7 is nice, but it's not the end of the world if the server is down for > 12 hours. The server is normally running about 1.5 hits/second with about > 30 10MB mod_perl processes. Low database activity. So I imagine an $800 > PC running linux could do the job -- saving $63,200 in the process ;). > > Anyway, I've read the Guide on this issue again, and I've looked over the > High-Availability Linux Project, but I was wondering if anyone knew of > links or had experience with building a nice small inexpensive and reliable > server for running mod_perl. Frankly, A single CPU P550 running Linux with > 1G RAM and a couple fast SCSI drives (and some decent ISP connectivity) > would more than do the job. But what do I know! Do mod_perl programmers > know hardware? > > So, I'm not looking for any specific advice, or do I want to discuss the > maintenance issues, but just some basic ideas on hardware, or pointers to > links you might have found useful. > > Like: "I'm running a P550 with 1G, ultra-wide SCSI and 10 hits/second and > never see any load problem." > > or "Check out this link and see how to run two inexpensive boxes in > parallel to maintain 100% uptime and you even don't have to worry about > tape backup." > > or "No, it's worth running RAID with hot-swappable disks and power supplies." > > or "I'll set up that server for $64,000!!" (no, sorry, I'm first in line > for that job...) i am running a PII 350 w/128mg ram and SCSI-2 7200rpm harddrives. i put out as many at 12K page views a day, nothing compared to Ask at Valueclick, although my pages are kind of big - about 60K worth. all of my pages have dynamic content rendered with mod_perl and Embperl and I suppress browser caching anytime the customer has an active cart. only the gifs and jpegs are static. the checkout process is all SSL of course. i have not yet set-up the reverse proxying etc. on the tuits list. unless i am running some kind of maintenance (log analysis) etc., this system is always over 90% idle and never uses the swap space. keystone was trying to sell me their monitoring and testing service and they pounded on the machine for a couple of weeks, and it came through with flying colors. always showing very small error rates and responses rates in the 90th percentile. so, i intended this as a starter system, and i was expecting have to upgrade. but, it looks like it will make another season before it becomes another firewall, honeypot or internal server. === Subject: Re: [OT] The $64K question/server hardware From: Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org> Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 22:14:15 +0100 (BST) I'm running a P550 with 256M, IDE and 1.5 hits/second behind a 64Kbit leased line and I never see any load problem... ;-) I run 3 httpds. And Sybase. === Subject: Re: [OT] The $64K question/server hardware From: "Erich L. Markert" <emarkert@pace.edu> Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2000 08:40:50 -0400 I've been using a dual processor, PIII 400+ Mhz Dell PowerEdge server that has 512MB RAM 2 9GB SCSI drives running Redhat Linux, Apache, mod_perl, HTML::Embperl and it's been working like a champ. Price tag: $8000 Not to plug Dell but they have some really nice server offerings and now fully support Linux as well... === Subject: Re: [OT] The $64K question/server hardware From: Jauder Ho <jauderho@carumba.com> Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 09:20:15 -0700 (PDT) Heh, I put in a solution that was MUCH larger. 16 sun servers (14 E420R and 2 E6500s) just in the production environment. Total server count was somewhere in the 60s. One thing to note is that IIS on NT4 leaks memory like mad on a high volume site so you will have to keep rebooting the boxes. The solution put in place required both Sun and NT machines and the Sun boxes were infinitely more stable (even though they were using *ugh* Netscape Enterprise Server). But IIS on Windows 2000 appears to be much better. ===