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."

Comments

So the article on preventing the /. effect ...

[burgburgburg]

will be tested to see if it's meaningful. I like that. That is definitely putting your money where your mouth is.

Of course, it is incumbent upon all of us to rush out and try to the link to the article. And some of us to actually read it as opposed to just reading the title.

<blows horn>

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Battlestations!

SLASHDOT THEM AGAIN!!!

yes.

[krog]

seeing as it took Slashdot 35 seconds to serve me up this comments.pl?op-Reply page, yes, i think we are supposed to be impressed.

Ones that crashs

[MCMLXXVI]

I would be more interested in stats on a webserver that took a puke. It would be interesting to see what started the dominos falling and what ultimatly brought it down. It would be as good a learning experiance as this article is.

That's hardly impressive

[shoppa]

When one of the sites that I serve, The Computer History Simulation Project, was slashdotted, I was serving 40-50 pages per second (which is nearly ten times the rate attributed to Ace's Hardware) on a 4-year-old webserver (a K6II-500) that cost about $200 to put together. And the server itself was ticking along with only a few percent CPU usage.

OTOH, my puny little SDSL connection was seriously maxed out.

Even old hardware can happily serve up hundreds of documents a second, if the pages are static.

Re:only 600, 000 per day?

[stratjakt]

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.