High-Performance Web Server How-To

ssassen writes "Aspiring to build a high-performance web server? Hardware Analysis has an article posted that details how to build a high-performance web server from the ground up. They tackle the tough design choices and what hardware to pick and end up with a web server designed to serve daily changing content with lots of images, movies, active forums and millions of page views every month."

Comments

High-performance web server

[quigonn]

I'd suggest everybody with the need of a high-performance web server to try out
fnord. It's extremely small, and pretty fast (without any special performance hacks!), see here.

my $0.02

[spoonist]

* I prefer SCSI over IDE

* RedHat is a pain to strip down to a bare minimum web server, I prefer OpenBSD. Sleek and elegant like the early days of Linux distros.

* I've used Dell PowerEdge 2650 rackmount servers and they're VERY well made and easy to use. Redundant power supplies, SCSI removable drives, good physical security (lots of locks).

Why Apache?

[chrysalis]

I don't understand.

Their article is about building a high performance web server, and they tell people to use Apache.

Apache is featureful, but it has never been designed to be fast.

Zeus is designed for high performance.

The article supposes that money is not a problem. So go for Zeus. The Apache recommendation is totally out of context.

Server running at near 100% load

[ssassen]

From the SecureCRT console, connected through SSH1, as the backend is giving me timeouts. I can tell you that we're near 100% server load and are still serving out those pages to at least 1500 clients. I'm sure some of you get timeouts or can't even reach the server at all, for that I apologize, but we just have one of these, not a whole rack full of them.

Have a good weekend,

Sander Sassen

Email: ssassen@hardwareanalysis.com
Visit us at: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com

Re:"Three times the power?"

[NineNine]

"Microsoft Windows 2000 Pro"

I got a good laugh out of this... W2K Pro is the desktop version, not the server version. Wow. Great article. Really well informed author.

Re:That "howto" sucks

[jimfrost]

High traffic sites, the ones that are really dynamic anyway, do more than that.

They start with a load balancer at the front end, or possibly several layers of load balancer. If they run a distributed operation they'll use smart DNS systems or routers to direct requests to the most local server cluster. The server cluster will be fronted by a request scattering system.

Behind the request scattering system you'll find a cluster of machines whose job it is to serve static content (often the bulk of data served by a site) and route dynamic requests to another cluster of servers, enforcing session affinity for the dynamic requests.

Behind the static content servers are the application servers. They do the heavy lifting, building dynamic pages as appropriate for individual users and caching everything they can to offload the database.

Behind the application servers is the database or database cluster. The latter is really not that useful if you have a highly dynamic site as there are problems with data synchronization in database clusters (no matter what the database vendors tell you). But that's ok, single databases can handle a lot of volume if built correctly and caching is done appropriately at the application level.

And there you have it, the structure of a really large site.

Re:But any web server is high-performance

[jimfrost]

I've seen both kinds and take it from me, many small servers is more of a headache than the hardware cost savings is worth. Your network architecture gets complicated, you end up having to hire lots of people just to keep the machines running and with up-to-date software, and database connection pooling becomes a lot less efficient.

You save money in the long run by buying fewer, more powerful machines.

Re:"Three times the power?"

[(H)elix1]

That was total FUD. The two operating systems have comparable performance on the same hardware.

Win2k pro limits you to 10 concurrent TCP/IP connections, Win2K Server has no (artificial) limit but won't cluster, Advanced Server can cluster but I don't know a thing about it..

Linux has no (artificial) limit... not sure about clustering options there either.

Found out about the TCP/IP limit when I added SP2 and trashed my evening counter-strike server - this makes a HUGE difference.

Re:"Three times the power?"

[elemental23]

The maximum number of other computers that are permitted to simultaneously connect over the network to Windows NT Workstation 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, and Windows 2000 Professional is ten. This limit includes all transports and resource sharing protocols combined. This limit is the number of simultaneous sessions from other computers the system is permitted to host.

From Microsoft Knowledge Base Article Q122920.
(Warning: The page layout is broken in Mozilla)

It's an artificial limitation. The idea is that if you need more simultaneous connections you should buy Win2k Server. In other words, MS wants you to spend more money.