Server Bottlenecks?

[donnacha]

Following feedback on this forum, I have decided to hedge my bets and start my new VB site with a less powerful/less expensive server set-up, with the option to upgrade to something better/more servers at a later date.

Will the following specs be enough to grow my community to a reasonable size? And where should I expect bottlenecks to occur?

2.4 Ghz Intel CELERON
80GB Hard Drive
1024MB RAM
1000GB of Bandwidth
5 IP's
FreeBSD

$79.00/mth, $99.00/setup

(Jumping up to an equivalent P4 2.8 800FSB would cost an extra $50/mth, would it really be worth the extra expense? Particularly when you consider I could almost get another Celeron and a whole new batch of bandwidth for the same money?)


The site itself won't be particularly graphicly intense, although I will be integrating a few hacks including either vBindex or vBadvanced HomePage.

The server will be used only for vB, no hosting or anything.

As ever, I appreciate all advice and opinions.

Thanks,

Donnacha

[Karthick]

I assume you're with managed.com.

The truth is managed.com really really sucks. Read WHT forums before you buy anything webhosting.

[RichM]

I think he may be with ServerMatrix.
Anyway i think it is always best to avoid Celerons at all costs. They are just faulty P3's/P4's that have their FSB lowered down so that they can run whilst being stable. (Don't quote me on that as i am not 100% sure, i read it somewhere)

I had a Celeron 1.3ghz with EV1, it struggled to run itself, let alone run a forum.

[SaintDog]

Celerons are ok, but personally, I'd leave them to the low-end desktops used for schools or non-intensive word processing. You won't find *many* servers that are performing well under medium to large loads running celerons, they'll be running P4's or the pentium range or dual-server processors; possibly even AMD's (I run a few myself and they work well, as long as they are not durons).

If it is going to be a more branched-out personal site, I'd say you would be fine, but if you plan on going with a site that is going to attract quite a few visitors, have many downloads, or members active at vBulletin, I'd go ahead with the P4.

[donnacha]

Thanks Karthick, HostOrbit and SaintDog.

I assume you're with managed.com.
I think he may be with ServerMatrix.
I am, indeed, looking at ServerMatrix, this is one of those weekly offers they run on WHT, this week it's extra memory, last week it was a 2nd HDD, sometimes its free CPanel. It's actually pretty clumsy marketing because they apply these offers only to certain machines, creating way too large a price gap with the other machines.

For instance, last week I was thinking about getting two of their 2.8 P4s, each with a free extra HDD, $99/setup, $139/mth each BUT, then, I figured it made sense to get a RAID card too, rather than slowing everything down by performing it via software. Unfortunately, they don't offer a RAID card as a simple add-on, instead you have to get their specific RAID offering, which is basically their 2.8 offering with a 2nd HDD as standard and a RAID card, usually costing $50 pm more. If you break it down, $40 pm of that represents the cost of the 2nd HDD and, therefore, the remaining $10 pm must represent the cost of the RAID card, sounds about right for an item that costs around $15 to buy outright.

Now, the kicker there was that no form of the WHT offer applied to the RAID offering. It already came with a 2nd HDD and they weren't willing to offer any sort of equivalent bonus such as a free 512 ram (normal add-on cost of $20 pm), meaning that, between the indentical 2.8 and the 2.8 RAID, there was an incredible $50 pm/$600 pa of additional cost, just for a $15, easy-to-install RAID card. I couldn't justify that and dropped the whole thing.

Don't get me wrong, I do thing some of the things people on WHT expect from hosts are ridiculous, this is an industry with razor-tight margins, but when I see offers like SMs which create ridiculous price gaps and deter you from signing up to their more expensive packages, I do have to wonder what sort of crack they're on.

SM's WHT offer should apply to their entire range or, at the very least, not deter customers from buying their higher-end packages. Where a particular offer cannot apply to a specific package, an equivalent offer should apply.


Anyway i think it is always best to avoid Celerons at all costs. They are just faulty P3's/P4's that have their FSB lowered down so that they can run whilst being stable. (Don't quote me on that as i am not 100% sure, i read it somewhere)

I had a Celeron 1.3ghz with EV1, it struggled to run itself, let alone run a forum.
Celerons are ok, but personally, I'd leave them to the low-end desktops used for schools or non-intensive word processing. You won't find *many* servers that are performing well under medium to large loads running celerons, they'll be running P4's or the pentium range or dual-server processors;
I take all your points, and I guess I'm back to P4 as the answer to what I hope will be a reasonably busy forum. I do wonder, though, if the Celeron's upward creeping Ghz might be narrowing the gap? I wonder if the 2.4 Celeron's extra umph makes any difference in a server situation, compared to the 1.3 HostOrbit was using?

I'm not sure if the "faulty" P3/P4s thing applies anymore; I know they used to do that but, at this stage, they probably sell vastly more Celerons and there's no way they could fill that demand entirely with failed P4s. They probably do still use the Celeron line to soak up the occassional sub-standard chip that the P4 line throws up but the vast majority of Celerons are probably made specifically as Celerons. And, even if you do get a Celeron that once dreamt of being a P4, I guess they wouldn't sell it if they thought it couldn't run stably as a Celeron.

But, yes, I guess I'm going to go for a P4 but I do find myself wondering if that extra $600 pa might be better spent, say, round-robining TWO celerons. And at what point is a CELERON powerful enough to be a worthwhile server CPU in its own right?

Thanks again for replying and I'd still be interested in hearing any other opinions out there.

Donnacha

[Mike Warner]

Well I'm running a P4 2.0 with 1 Gb ram. I had 352 users online the other day and the server load was at around 2ish - not bad. No slow down detected either. My site has 11000 registered users and around 1.3 million posts with over 2000 posts each day.

I did have major issues before, but upgraded php and My Sql and everything sorted itself out.

Just make sure you keep uptodate with software and you should be good for 500 concurrent users on that server

[donnacha]

Just make sure you keep uptodate with software and you should be good for 500 concurrent users on that serverHi Mike, thanks for replying. Just to clarify, do you mean the 2.8 Cel or the 2.8 P4 when you say it should be good for 500 concurrent users? I presume you mean the P4 but want to make sure.

And does your 2.0 handle that many without any problems?

[Mike Warner]

I would have thought a P4 2.0 and Celeron 2.8 would be fairly comparable. I think my server could take 500+ so I would have thought the Celeron 2.8 would also be fine with the number of users - although I have no direct experience of this.

Not sure how my server copes so well - I've been really impressed with it. As I said before, I did have major server load issues - but this was due to outdated php and my sql software.

Little tip for server load issues with vbindex - take out all sections in the php file that calculates the number of posts since the user was last online. Then remove it from the templates too. I found this feature to cause massive server loads.

[Mike Warner]

Just a thought - check out my site here:
http://www.migweb.co.uk/forums

There are quite a few people on it now, so you can get an idea of how well the server responds.

[donnacha]

Nice site mike, very clean design, lightning fast with 81 users online. I particularly like the usefulness of car sellers being able to include photos, very nice.

Thanks for the vBindex tip, at the moment I'm leaning more towards vBadvanced HomePage, mainly because it beat vBindex in the Hack of the Month vote on vbulletin.org. Why did you decide to go for vBindex?

[Mike Warner]

Why did you decide to go for vBindex?Because vBadvance wasn't around at the time. I may swap over to it when vB3 gold comes out.