The optimal choice of server configuration

“- How many unique hits per day can one server configuration handle?”

You can often see this question asked in forums and our managers hear it from clients every day. This question is of current interest and I’ll try to do my best in this article to answer it fully so any person without technical education would be able to understand.

By this question is meant how many thousands of unique visitors can handle one server configuration. When we hear such question, we usually ask another one: “For what tasks do you need a server?” The thing is that every task has its own specificity and the more exact the task is, the more exact information we can give you on how many hits this server can handle or choose the most suitable configuration corresponding to your requirements. Let’s consider some typical tasks where we pay particular attention to the following aspects: HDD system, appropriateness of raid use, RAM, CPU and internet-canals.

Gallery posting, static content.

Gallery posting and placement of static content (images, video, and archives) is one of the most non resource-intensive tasks. Any CPU will suit these needs - Pentium 4 or Celeron. As image output takes less resources if server is configured correctly then SATA disks is the ideal content storage solution for you. If besides that you use RAID-1 (i.e. mirroring), you will get a good faulttolerance system. The use of 1-2 Gb of RAM is a big plus in such server because the file system automatically places a list of most used files into its cache and doesn’t address the disk every time it’s needed. Bandwidths play a very important role. Many hosts offer “unlimited bandwidth” or “unlimited traffic”, for example 10-20Mbit. Such claims are exaggerations since bandwidth is a finite resource and thus limited. In case you use it and your resources will be listed in large TGP/MGP, then the server’s performance will become impended because of the limited bandwidth and will automatically block all the requests. I recommend taking bandwidth which exceeds your requirements, for example, 100Mbit or 1Gbit but with the fee charged per GB for the amount of traffic used or for the amount of Mbit. It’s important to pay particular attention to the number and the quality of bandwidths. It’s good if the host is multihomed i.e. has several physical uplinks. Otherwise, if the uplink fails outside of the datacenter, all the resources will be unavailable.

Summary: server configuration - P4 2.8 / 1-2Gb RAM / 2 x 80Gb SATA will handle up to 100Mbit of traffic.

CJ, link lists.

It is no secret that the faster CJ opens, the higher its productivity. The productivity is one of the most important indicators of resource work. A budget server is suitable for moderate resources but in case your resources rapidly developing then you need to think about more serious hardware. CJ and link lists work a lot with disks, that’s why SCSI disks are really essential. Moreover, because there are a lot of read/write operations, more powerful CPU such as Xeon or Opteron is necessary. If you place all the statistics on a separate server as it was described above where only scripts are processed, so there is no reason to worry. You resource won’t be slow when it reaches 300 thousand of unique visitors. Such system is easily scaled and more stable. Let’s talk bandwidths now. There is no need to pick limited bandwidth for CJ but for link lists which don’t use a lot of traffic this bandwidth is quite suitable.

Summary: for rapidly developing projects, good resources are necessary to avoid downtime. For TGP owner the following configuration is suitable: Dual Xeon 3.0 / 2Gb RAM/ 2 x 36(73) SCSI

Backup.

We all understand that use of RAID for disk mirroring increases reliability of data storage. But in case if both disks (RAID-1) experience a mechanical failure, external backup is necessary if you want to be sure in data integrity.

What do you need to consider in the choice of backup-server? Backup is usually performed once a week and it means that disks subsystem doesn’t experience heavy load. Besides during backup operation only changed files are usually synchronized that leads to minimum load on server. For backupserver it’s enough to have CPU 600MHz, 512 RAM but the number of disks and their space depend on data volume. If you need to store a lot of data, then install RAID-5 and more than 3 SATA disks, if not, then install a couple of disks and RAID-1. There is no meaning to use SCSI on backup-server. It’s good to have working and backup server connected to one switch and to minimum 100Mbit portals. In this case synchronization will be performed quickly. Besides, lots of providers don’t count intranet traffic.

In this short article I tried my best to describe basic tasks which can be met daily. If you have a specific task, the best decision is to contact professionals of the host company you like. Together you will be able to find the needed variant which meets all the requirements

Mike Fox,
Fedora-Hosting.com