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Scaling Server Performance

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the caching-for-fun-and-profit dept.

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."

4 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. But the ad server is slashdotted by ites · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    Now, a while back on /. 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.

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  2. Isnt the real problem BANDwidth? by Kevin+Stevens · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:only 600, 000 per day? by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    The web-design and server world seems to be focused on quantity, not quality.

    And frankly, much of what /. links to are personal sites run off of a DSL line. I think the effect has more to do with bandwidth than server load.

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  4. Who cares how long it takes for static pages? by pcraven · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.