Slashdot Mirror
Scaling Server Performance
An anonymous reader writes "When Ace's Hardware's article Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mainframe was posted on Slashdot, they got 590,000 hits and over 250,000 page requests during one day. This kind of traffic caused only a 21% average CPU load to their Java-based web server, which is powered by a single 550MHz UltraSparc-II CPU. In their newest article, Scaling Server Performance, Ace's Hardware explains how this was possible."
Are we supposed to be impressed with a computer that can serve 8 hits and 4 pages per second?
Is the /. effect a benchmark test for web sites?, since when?
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
Which is very funny: this is an article explaining how a web site survived the /. effect, thus trying to catch the /. readers back for a second round, and getting lots of advertising hits at the same time. If only that server could keep up. /. I saw a report about a 200Mhz (?) PC running Windows 95 and with about 30 hard disks, that also seemed to do very well under the /. effect.
Now, a while back on
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I never really thought that the problem lied with the server's hardware, but in the bandwidth to the host. Shouldn't an article be written about how to conserve bandwidth during a slashdot effect? Even older servers should be able to handle 100 requests per second. I think most FPS's are alot more taxing than that.
In 1994 websites were nothing more than text documents with perhaps a handful of small .gifs in them. They werent plastered with media-intensive-ads, java applets and shockwave whizbangers, background music, video clips streaming off the same server and blah blah blah innovation.
/. links to are personal sites run off of a DSL line. I think the effect has more to do with bandwidth than server load.
The web-design and server world seems to be focused on quantity, not quality.
And frankly, much of what
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Some static story pages? Who cares?
It all depends if you are actually doing something of interest.
Like the comments in Slashcode, most apps go from static, to dynamic, to static caching of dynamic pages.
At DTN we served up customized portal pages to people with commodity and equity quotes, news, graphs, etc. Since they didn't have any money we had to use a load balanced Pentium Pro and a Pentium II. The app had no problem serving the load, and it was fast.
Now that I work for companies that have money, our apps run really slow. Developers get expensive machines and don't know how to optimize any more.
That could be true, but this article is talking about dynamic database based pages. There's a huge difference.
256K of cache on die, ALI chipset board that's a lot like a PC, slow PC133 (with very high latency) memory, dog-fucking-slow disk, unless they're using SCSI.
This is not your father's E450.
-30-
As a bunch of people have pointed out, it is unlikely that the /. effect is a matter of "crashing" servers. It is much more likely that most of the "slashdotted" sites on the front page on a given day involve a server which is doing just fine and a bandwidth pipe which is seriously about to burst.
You can saturate most any small-business-affordable pipe with a Pentium classic machine as a Web server. Or to put it another way, there's no point sticking a dual-P4-Xeon Web server with 4GB memory and a RAID-5 on a DSL line.
The computer I'm using right now (a PIII system) could run Apache very nicely in the background and would likely survive quite a hitrate without too much trouble. But if even just a few thousand people were to hit it all at once, there would be a traffic jam, some people wouldn't get served, and the ISP would probably close me down, because I'm only sitting on a 256k pipe.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I hate to do this, and get into some kind of "look at my l33t skills" type thing...but seriously, those numbers are just nothing to be impressed with. As several people have pointed out, usually the limitation on a well configured server is the bandwidth available. I have a buddy who runs a few adult sites, and I go ahead and keep his machines updated, optimized, etc, etc. On one web server alone, with simply rebuild Apache with a higher HSL and streamlining only essential services this *one* server is handling an average of 16,000,000 hits per day. (avg approx. 16,000,000 hits, 5,000,000 pageviews, 450,000 unique visitors per day). In fact, only last month did we set up a separate database server in anticipation of him getting even more traffic (I wanted to separate the web server from the db server esp. if we were gonna move to load balancing)...even still the cpu load was consistently low and the site was/is serving dynamically generated content (php) and is all driven by a mysql content management system. I have yet to even max out the usage of the server and do some ulimit type stuff or hard adjustments via kernel changes.... so what is the big deal about this article. I think it would be good to put up an article about how to optimize your web servers both in layout and actual configurations to allow for Slashdot levels of traffic. I doubt this will happen, just as the mirroring content on featured stories to help ease bandwidth or other similar suggestions. The saddest part is that once you spend the time to really optimize a machine or machines...it takes far less time to maintain them.
I have read both articles from Ace's Hardware about how they built their "killer" web server. And in all that talk about the server and the applications that run on it they make no mention of what they did to the OS and the machine itself other than putting faster drives in it. They show an Ultra 30 as a server running a GUI, if I wanted "killer" performance CDE would be the first thing to go! They also don't mention any tweaks to improve system and network performance (and there are a few I can think of). Hell I'm willing to bet they didn't change the jumper setting on the Blade to get the memory to run at 100 MHz over the default 84 MHz as shipped! they also don't do anything like multipath or trunk network adapters (which you could easily do with Solaris). It looks like they took a machine out of the box, did a default install of Solaris, loaded applcations and "plugged it into the net"! I wonder how much better their performance would be if they tuned their server like Colin Bitterfield (of Sun Microsystems) did?
It is SO frustrating for people to say "well I had trouble w/Tomcat blah blah blah". Listen up people, Tomcat is a REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION. Simply put, this means they are more concerned with features than with performance/stability/scability. Yes this is a good thing, because it lets us try out the new specs before the real products adopt them. If you don't believe me, look how many "WORKSFORME" resolutions there are in Bugzilla, far too many to justify a real product. Sure its on Jakarta and sure it is fine for developing/testing apps but it is totally unsuitable for a large/medium scale deployment. I refuse to deploy tomcat for anything other than an intranet application. Resin (and others) are rock solid performance demons that blow away pretty much any other comparable dynamic server pages out there (Java and not)
As far as PHP, of course its not going to handle the numbers, its a weak design. If you don't believe me, look at the list of upcoming features in PHP, nearly all of which have been in Java for years.
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