Slashdot Mirror
Load Balancing Heavy Websites on Current Tech?
squared99 asks: "I have just delved into some research on a set up for very high traffic websites. I'm particularly interested in how many webservers would be needed at minimum and the type of technology powering them. Slashdot seemed like a good sample site to check out, so I went to Slashdot's technology FAQ to get a starting point. This setup seems to be from 2000, is most likely a bit out of date, and I'm assuming the same number of webservers would not be needed with current server technology. What would experts in the Slashdot community recommend as a required setup to handle Slashdot-like volumes, if they had to do it today using more current hardware? How many webservers could it be reduced to, while maintaining enough redundancy to keep serving pages, even under the heaviest of loads?"
Many sites are moving towards utility based hosting or virtualized setups. The problem with high capacity sites is that you often end up having to purchase enough servers to deal with peak time, but don't need the servers during off hours. Utility based hosting services charge you for what you _use_ and allow you to scale as needed. Savvis (http://www.savvis.net/ I know offers a utility hosting platform based on Inkra, 3Par and blade servers. IBM has a similar setup.
Take Pound, a few web server machines, a database server and a NFS server (no Coda, AFS or GFS needed in most cases) and you should be set. This is a setup that I installed for a high traffic website and it is very stable.