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Building a Better Webserver

Posted by michael on from the slashdot-will-beat-a-path-to-your-door dept.

msolnik writes: "The guys over at Aces' Hardware have put up a new article going over the basics, and not-so-basics, of building a new server. This is a very informative, I think everyone should devote 5 minutes and a can of Dr Pepper to this article."

3 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Re:New Webserver? - not good by john@iastate.edu · · Score: 5, Informative
    Well, lots of big iron gets crushed by the slashdot effect too. This thing is running on a piddly little Sun, after all. And it was very responsive early.

    One thing that does seem to work against the onslaught is a throttling webserver. If you haven't got the bandwidth etc to serve a sudden onslaught of requests, probably the best thing to do is to just start 503'ing -- at least people get a quick message 'come back later' instead of just dead air.

    --
    Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
  2. Re:Compression for dialup connections??? by victim · · Score: 5, Informative

    One other factor to consider is that the gzip transfer encoding compresses much better than the algorithm in the modem. Part of this is the algorithm with its larger dictionary size, the other part is the `pure' data stream being fed to it. It is just the html, not the html interspersed with ppp, ip, and tcp headers.

  3. it's the BANDWIDTH by green+pizza · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you haven't noticed by now, Ace's Hardware has a neat little indicator on each page that shows time processing and queue time it spent getting to you (very bottom left-hand corner of each page). Most are about 74ms - 112ms for me. This, plus the result of some pings and traceroutes leads me to belive they're heavily BANDWIDTH bound right now, not CPU bound. I do hope Ace puts up a summary of the Slashdot effect as well as some other data for us to pour over. Some MRTG router graphs of the bandwidth usage would be *really* nice, too.