Slashdot Mirror
Real World Webserver Price vs. Performance Figures?
Borgoth asks: "At my company we just broke 10 million pageviews per day. We use 5 2-processor 1U off-the-shelf Intel boxes running Apache, Linux, mod_perl, and MySQL. This averages out to about 2 million pageviews per day per server (about 20 million hits/server, including images). Most of our pages have some dynamism using mod_include SSIs, and maybe one pageview in five directly results in a db query. We think we should be pretty happy that we're doing so much with so little, but we don't really have any idea how much horsepower other sites are using in their server farms. So, what sort of webfarms do Slashdot readers maintain, and how does their performance compare?"
I've been looking at this laely. Most sites seem to be able to do a million pages per webhead.
The answer for slashdot is more complex because we have three groups.
Article/comment servers can handle 200K of pages views a piece.
Index/All can handle 100K.
Static/XML can take a million per server.
I have a fix that goes in this week which should up Article/Comment, for index I am looking at a new system for caching the stories that should increase the index servers.
You can't grep a dead tree.
Who cares what everyone else does?
What is your system load? If it's less than 1, you've got processor power to spare. If it's more than one, you could add more processors IF you think that site response is too slow.
What is the throughput to your disks? Actually benchmark this with vmstat or something like that. If that shows that your disks are constantly maxed you could get more servers to spread the disk activity around, or you could build a faster disk subsystem if you've got a centralized database. Smart architecting helps too. Don't run the database on the same processors that run scripts and serve pages. Use the database load handling features to improve that specific part of the site. See what pages you can generate statically - I doubt that every single page on a site needs to be from the database.
Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
Here is my anecdotal evidences for the site I run:
The total outfit is 8 servers, 6 active: 1 DB Server with one hot backup (dual P-III 750, 1.5GB), 4 web servers (~1.1ghz, 1GB), 1 uniproc dedicated image server (1ghz, 1GB) with a hot backup.
The 4 web servers toss a combined total of about 1.5 million pageloads a day, of which 1.4 mil are dynamically generated using FastCGI/Perl and that others are shtml and stylesheets. A lot of the data that is queried from the DB server can and is cached on the web heads for better performance so that during peak times the server doesn't have to do much more than 80 queries/sec. The image server using stock Apache 1.3 however, does something like 3m serves a day without much sweat since it's all static content.
All told that works out to each web server doing something like 325,000 pageviews a day. I don't have a barometer of whether that's good or not, but honestly I worry more about bandwidth than computrons.
I think you should be pretty happy with what you're doing. I don't know of the current figures, but last september Slashdot was doing 2.4m pageviews a day with ~10 web heads (as gleaned from 'Taco's journal). Understand that's not an apples to apple comparison since I guess you're serving more static content while slashdot (and my site) are by and large dynamic.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
I'd say that you should probably talk to JW Smythe. He posted on an article, not too long ago, on bandwidth and porn. From his post he seems like someone who would be able to help you with your question.
Frankly, I don't think that even Slashdot gets as many page views per day, as you do.
You are using mod_gzip, aren't you? Depending on content, you may be able to reduce your bandwidth usage by 50%, at the expense of some CPU time.