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Server Specs
Hello,

I need a dedicated server but needed to know what specs should I be looking at? Please help me decide! What specs may be enough to support the below site info!

I will be using the following CGI scripts

Gossamer Mail
Search Engine using Links SQL
Classifieds using Link SQL

All from gossamer-threads.com

I will also be using other scripts as well.

I expect anywhere from 500 - 5,000 people using the sit at a time.

Thanks
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Re: [Coralwave] Server Specs In reply to
A 1.2Ghz / 1Gb RAM / Linux / 80Gb Hard Drive should be enough to cope with that. You may also want to install mod_perl, which will speed up the server by a lot. (may want to see http://www.gossamer-host.com)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
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Re: [Andy] Server Specs In reply to
5,000 people visiting the site at any one time.

Yes, you will most definitily need mod_perl, if not a seperate database server too. That kind of load is ridiculously high.

- wil
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Re: [Coralwave] Server Specs In reply to
Hi,

If you are going to be using that many programs from us, I'd look into hosting with us as well as we can support the apps on the server, as well as help tune the server to meet your needs. I'd start off with one of our Plan B servers: Dual 1.2 ghz Processor, 1 GB of Ram and 40 Gigs of hard drive space.

The servers fully support mod_perl (and mod_perl setup properly - a second backend mod_perl enabled apache that is fully managed and monitored). This will give you the best speed improvement.

If you send me a private message or email, I can give you more details as well as some example sites you can look at.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Server Specs In reply to
Hi Alex

You running two Apaches on the same box, one for static pages and one mod_perl enabled for the Perl programs?

- wil
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Re: [Wil] Server Specs In reply to
Quote:
You running two Apaches on the same box, one for static pages and one mod_perl enabled for the Perl programs?

Well, on gossamer-threads.com we are actually running three apache's: one for static html/images (and handles all other requests, but just proxies to the appropriate server), one for Gossamer apps (mainly the forum), and one for program demos. We separate the demos so that it runs as it's own non priv user (not that anything would be wrong in our demos). =)

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Server Specs In reply to
Excellent, too bad the databases are on the same server and not postgres by default. ;-)

- wil
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Re: [Wil] Server Specs In reply to
Why is it too bad about being on the same server? And for postgres do you mean gossamer-threads.com or the hosting plans?

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Server Specs In reply to
Ah, this is just more of a general rambling, detach from thread if you want.

Wouldn't it make sense for a high traffic site to have its database on a seperate server, and maybe two seperate servers for the www serving too? Say, one mod_perl enabled and one much lower spec for static html?

Does gossamer-threads.com/perl/forum run on MySQL or something else? I'm just advocating Postgres at the moment after working with 'it' recently on a high traffic site where the MySQL tables kept getting corrupted. But then again, I very much doubt it was MySQL, more a bad config or a borked setup somewhere.

Oh, and it's not "too bad" as such, I'm just thinking of the ideal setup here. The OP did ask for a setup being able to handle 500 concurrent users?

- wil

Last edited by:

Wil: Jun 11, 2003, 1:12 AM
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Re: [Wil] Server Specs In reply to
Hi Wil,

Ah, but I've seen too many sites split things up needlessly. We had a client who had two web servers and a database server because the ISP did not know about mod_perl, so all the scripts were still going through CGI. We moved them to a single server under mod_perl and cut the cost in third and greatly improved response times.

So yes, separating the database to a second server can be useful, you really need an experienced eye to make sure that's the right split. Gossamer for example is overpowered if anything, load rarely goes above 0.1.

As for postgres, I actually had the reverse. A large custom site was using postgres and getting random corruptions with large text fields. I believe it was related to the server, but despite the great help of the postgres list, we could never track this down. The bad part about postgres, is that once the row corrupted, you'd lose the row, no way to get it back.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Server Specs In reply to
Even with postgres 7.3.x? Great improvements have been done to 7.3 even over 7.2. I personally find MySQL to scale brilliantly for sites which just retrieve flat data, even at very high loads, but for when a site needs to interact with a database for more than SELECTs, i.e. INSERT, UPDATE then I find MySQL doesn't scale as well as Postgres.

I've never actually ran a Gossamer installation under heavy load so I cannot say how well it scales, but I can imagine that it does scale very well looking at this forum, and even more so looking at the archived mod_perl etc. mailing lists you archive using the forum and the appropriate plugin.

The case study I'm following is www.perlmonks.org, which I am just an observer, but an interested one, looking at how they've split the site onto two dedicated www servers (both mod_perl enabled) and one database server now with 1gig of memory. Their holdup is with a) not the best codebase in the world and b) always, always the database server running out of memory or overloaded. Therefore, from that observant background, I've always been convinced that a heavy traffic site which utilises a lot of database activity should split the www from the database server, but as you say, only an experienced eye can actually locate the real bottleneck and take action from there.

- wil
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Re: [Wil] Server Specs In reply to
No, this was before 7.3's time. It was with 7.2.1. I haven't tried MySQL's Innodb table format, but yes, page level locking can kill you if you have a good mix of selects and updates (especially slow selects).

As for perlmonks, if their database server is still running out of memory, maybe it's a software problem rather then hardware.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.