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Building a Better Webserver
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."
Microsoft has written several white papers of this sort already. Of course, they're Microsoft, so that means I can kiss my +2 bonus goodbye. Seriously, though.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
The SPARCstation 20 was one heck of a great machine back in the day, especially for its size (a low profile pizzabox). The design was a lot like it's older brother (the SPARCstation 10 from 1992)... that is, two MBUS slots (for up to 4 CPUs) and 4 SBUS slots (Sun Expansion cards, 25 MHz x 64 bit = ~ 200 MB/sec each, but 400 MB/sec bus total).
I remember using a Sun evaulation model at Rice many years ago... the machine had two 150 MHz HyperSPARC processors (though 4 were avilable for more $$), a wide SCSI + fast ethernet card, two gfx cards for two monitors, and some sort of strange high speed serial card (for some oddball scanner, I think). Not to mention 512 MB of ram, in 1994! The machine was a pretty decent powerhouse and sooo small! I sort of wish the concept would have caught on, given how large modern workstations are in comparison. Heck, back then an SBUS card was about 1/3 the size of a modern 7" PCI card.
Then there's the other end of the spectrum... one department bought a Silicon Graphics Indigo2 Extrme in 1993. The gfx cardset was three full size GIO-64 cards (64 bit @ 100 MHz = about 800 MB/sec), one of which had 8 dedicated ASICs for doing geometry alone. 384 MB of RAM on that beast. Pretty wild stuff for the desktop.
Ahh, technology. I love you!
There are more factors than just CPU and Bandwidth... like what's between the two. A new coworker recently told me of his major learning experiences in the mid 1990s running several popular news websites durring the beginning of the web boom. One of the more popular sites he ran originally had a T1 routed through a Cisco 4000 router. Things worked great until he had an additional, load balancing T1 added for added thruput and redundancy. Things didn't feel much faster, in fact, they were almost slower. After much investigation he learned that the router didn't have enough RAM or CPU to handle the packet shuffling that intelligent multihoming routing requires. A similar instance happined with a friend's company when they tried to run a T3 through their existing router. While the old cisco had enough cpu and ram in theory, its switching hardware and thruput couldn't handle the full number of packets the T3 was providing thru the shiny new HSSI high speed serial card.
Now, I realize modern hardware (Cisco 3660 and 7x00 series, and pretty much any Juniper) can route several T3s (at 45mbps each direction) worth of data, but older routers and minimally configed routers do exist.
There are MANY bottlenecks in hosting a website. Server daemon, CPU, router, routing and filtering methods, latency and hops between server and internet backbones, overall bandwidth thruput, and much more.
It's not as simple as "lame server, overloaded CPU, should have installed distro version x+1".