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?"

Comments

My friend's site...

[rwsorden]

My buddy over at Oesterly.com seems to think that a Pentium 100 and 128MB is sufficient.

Re:Well CT?

[krow]

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.

My Anecdotal Evidence

[Xunker]

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.