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 This setup seems to be from 2000, is most likely a bit out of date, and I'm assuming the same number of webservers would not be needed with current server technology.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?"

Comments

Re:database is the bottleneck

[golgotha007]

First of all, any person that talks about 'hits per day' isn't someone who works with high traffic websites. To folks like us, it's all about page views, uniques and sometimes impressions.

we have 4 admins for the mysql servers.
What the hell for?

each has a hotswapable copy of the entire system running at another data center.
with proper failover, this is pointless and wasteful.

Cron static pages off the database when possible
I couldn't agree more.

I'm doing on average of 250k page views per day. My website is heavily database driven (all reads, almost no writes, but with some complex queries). Here are the specs:
Connection: Dual Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mbps) fiber-optic connections to AboveNet and XO Communications.
2.4GHz single processor P4.
1GB RAM
mysql-4.1.3
php-4.3.8
Apache/2.0.51

I'm doing more traffic than you, and it's all done on a single processor, single machine. This machine is so bored, the load never breaks 0.10.

I actually have another machine ready to act as a secondary webserver, but I just don't need it! Right now, I'm just using it for backups and failover.