TheEDIGuy
Tue 28th Feb '06, 3:36pm
I've moved way too many times as my site has grown, but I'm starting to think it's time again.
My site has approximately 37,000 users, 1.7 million posts, and normally 700 concurrent users with peaks around 1,500-2,000. Right now, when we hit peaks, I have to turn off features on the site such as who's online, etc.
I've tried dual servers (apache and DB), and I've tried various sizes of single server configurations. So far, I seem to have the best performance in normal circumstances from a single-server setup.
Right now, I'm running on a dual Xeon 2.8, 4gb RAM, and large SCSI drives (one for the DB, and one for the file system). I'm paying around $500 a month, and I want to not increase my costs too terribly much.
Would you recommend 2 smaller load-balanced servers on the apache end, and a similarly-configured DB server on the back end? Could I get away with a smaller server on the DB end, if I took off the web stuff? Would you recommend a RAID drive setup? RAID 1 or RAID 5? I don't know too much about hardware, myself. More of a software guy.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Rather than continue to tweak out my current configuration (I've got it squeezed as tightly as I think I'm able to), I'd much rather consider different options and just need a bit of advice.
Thanks in advance!
My site has approximately 37,000 users, 1.7 million posts, and normally 700 concurrent users with peaks around 1,500-2,000. Right now, when we hit peaks, I have to turn off features on the site such as who's online, etc.
I've tried dual servers (apache and DB), and I've tried various sizes of single server configurations. So far, I seem to have the best performance in normal circumstances from a single-server setup.
Right now, I'm running on a dual Xeon 2.8, 4gb RAM, and large SCSI drives (one for the DB, and one for the file system). I'm paying around $500 a month, and I want to not increase my costs too terribly much.
Would you recommend 2 smaller load-balanced servers on the apache end, and a similarly-configured DB server on the back end? Could I get away with a smaller server on the DB end, if I took off the web stuff? Would you recommend a RAID drive setup? RAID 1 or RAID 5? I don't know too much about hardware, myself. More of a software guy.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Rather than continue to tweak out my current configuration (I've got it squeezed as tightly as I think I'm able to), I'd much rather consider different options and just need a bit of advice.
Thanks in advance!