Slashdot's Setup, Part 1- Hardware

As part of our 10-Year anniversary coverage, we intend to update our insanely dated FAQ entry that describes our system setup. Today is Part 1 where we talk mostly about the hardware that powers Slashdot. Next week we'll run Part 2 where we'll talk mostly about Software. Read on to learn about our routers, our databases, our webservers and more. And as a reminder, don't forget to bid on our charity auction for the EFF and if you are in Ann Arbor, our anniversary party is tomorrow night.

CT:Most of the following was written by Uriah Welcome, famed sysadmin extraordinaire, responsible for our corporate intertubes. He Writes...

Many of you have asked about the infrastructure that supports your favorite time sink... err news site. The question even reached the top ten questions to ask CmdrTaco. So I've been asked to share our secrets on how we keep the site up and running, as well as a look towards the future of Slashdot's infrastructure. Please keep in mind that this infrastructure not only runs Slashdot, but also all the other sites owned by SourceForge, Inc.: SourceForge.net, Thinkgeek.com, Freshmeat.net, Linux.com, Newsforge.com, et al.

Well, let's begin with the most boring and basic details. We're hosted at a Savvis data center in the Bay Area. Our data center is pretty much like every other one. Raised floors, UPSs, giant diesel generators, 24x7 security, man traps, the works. Really, once you've seen one class A data center, you've seen them all. (CT: I've still never seen one. And they won't let us take pictures. Boo savvis.)

Next, our bandwidth and network. We currently have two Active-Active Gigabit uplinks; again nothing unique here, no crazy routing, just symmetric, equal cost uplinks. The uplinks terminate in our cage at a pair of Cisco 7301s that we use as our gateway/border routers. We do some basic filtering here, but nothing too outrageous; we tier our filtering to try to spread the load. From the border routers, the bits hit our core switches/routers, a pair of Foundry BigIron 8000s. They have been our workhorses throughout the years. The BigIron 8000s have been in production since we built this data center in 2002 and actually, having just looked at it... haven't been rebooted since. These guys used to be our border routers, but alas... their CPUs just weren't up to the task after all these years and growth. Many machines plug directly into these core switches, however for certain self contained racks we branch off to Foundry FastIron 9604s. They are basically switches and do nothing but save us ports on the cores.

Now onto the meat: the actual systems. We've gone through many vendors over the years. Some good, some...not so much. We've had our share of problems with everyone. Currently in production we have the following: HP, Dell, IBM, Rackable, and I kid you not, VA Linux Systems. Since this article is about Slashdot, I'll stick to their hardware. The first hop on the way to Slashdot is the load balancing firewalls, which are a pair of Rackable Systems 1Us; P4 Xeon 2.66Gz, 2G RAM, 2x80GB IDE, running CentOS and LVS. These guys distribute the traffic to the next hop, which are the web servers.

Slashdot currently has 16 web servers all of which are running Red Hat 9. Two serve static content: javascript, images, and the front page for non logged-in users. Four serve the front page to logged in users. And the remaining ten handle comment pages. All web servers are Rackable 1U servers with 2 Xeon 2.66Ghz processors, 2GB of RAM, and 2x80GB IDE hard drives. The web servers all NFS mount the NFS server, which is a Rackable 2U with 2 Xeon 2.4Ghz processors, 2GB of RAM, and 4x36GB 15K RPM SCSI drives. (CT: Just as a note, we frequently shuffle these 16 servers from one task to another to handle changes in load or performance. Next week's software story will explain in much more detail exactly what we do with those machines. Also as a note- the NFS is read-only, which was really the only safe way to use NFS around 1999 when we started doing it this way.)

Besides the 16 web servers, we have 7 databases. They currently are all running CentOS 4. They breakdown as follows: 2 Dual Opteron 270's with 16GB RAM, 4x36GB 15K RPM SCSI Drives These are doing multiple-master replication, with one acting as Slashdot's single write-only DB, and the other acting as a reader. We have the ability to swap their functions dynamically at any time, providing an acceptable level of failover.

2 Dual Opteron 270's with 8GB RAM, 4x36GB 15K RPM SCSI Drives These are Slashdot's reader DBs. Each derives data from a specific master database (listed above). The idea is that we can add more reader databases as we need to scale. These boxes are barely a year old now — and still are plenty fast for our needs.

Lastly, we have 3 Quad P3 Xeon 700Mhz with 4GB RAM, 8x36GB 10K RPM SCSI Drives which are sort of our miscellaneous 'other' boxes. They are used to host our accesslog writer, an accesslog reader, and Slashdot's search database. We need this much for accesslogs because moderation and stats require a lot of CPU time for computation.

And that is basically it, in a nutshell. There isn't anything too terribly crazy about the infrastructure. We like to keep things as simple as possible. This design is also very similar to what all the other SourceForge, Inc. sites use, and has proved to scale quite well.

CT: Thanks to Uriah and Chris Brown for the report. Now if only we remember to update the FAQ entry...

Comments

Savvis

[garethwi]

Nice to see you're hosted by a Microsoft Gold Partner. That's a benchmark of quality.

Redhat 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me that's a hilarious joke...

Re:Redhat 9

[Shakrai]

and is therefore completely unsupported.

I've been in the mission critical provider business (ISP, then an insurance agency, now in health care) for almost eight years now and I'd take community support (websites, forums, and *gasp* USENET) over corporate support any day of the week.

Yes, it's nice to be able to sell your project to the PHB/MBA by saying "We'll always have support if we have problems!", but anybody that has spent a few hours on the phone with their vendor and who realizes that they know the product better then the Level Four support guys do, comes to realize that support isn't the sliver bullet that it's presented as.

Have my vendors helped me out in the past? Absolutely. But will I upgrade away from a rock-solid system that has served me well for years merely to gain support with a newer version? No way in hell......

Re:Redhat 9

[Shakrai]

Rule #1 of a mission-critical application is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Slashdot is mission-critical? That's what I'll tell my boss the next time he asks why I'm spending so much time on it ;)

Kidding aside though, I'm rather fond of the old joke that I found in 'fortune -o'. "Working computer hardware is a lot like an erect penis. It stays up as long as you don't fuck with it."

Re:Windows?

[QBasicer]

Do you know how many people would be heartbroken if they found out Slashdot was run off windows?

Re:Possibly obtuse question

[Precision]

Deployment date. The Redhat 9 machines were deployed 3 years ago and just haven't needed to be reinstalled yet. BSD, not so much.. we have a team of great linux admins, introducing another variable isn't likely to happen.

Finally some adult stories

[Jack Malmostoso]

Oh yes, geek pornography finally appears on /. :)
Thanks for the report, looking forward to the software part!

bandwidth usage and cost?

[TwoWheelTomy]

wonder how much bandwidth slashdot is using and how much it costs.

Re:bandwidth usage and cost?

[Precision]

The average monthly bandwidth usage for /. is around 40-50mbit/sec, which is relatively small. As for cost, you can contact your local ISP for a guesstimate, we get fairly deep discounts since we push quite a bit more with all the sites consolidated.

Re:the powers that be

[the_tsi]

Only the bad guys have red LCDs. That's how you tell them apart from the good guys, who always have blue or green. ... or purple, I guess, if you're a bad ass motherfucker.

Considered a CDN?

[xmpcray]

I was wondering if you ever considered using a CDN service like Akamai to serve content? Most of the big sites (Apple/MS etc) use it.

Re:Considered a CDN?

[Precision]

Actually many of our sites do use a CDN, however the /. devs long ago decided against it for some reason or another. Heck it's still even all setup for them.

Re:Interesting

[jamie]

Yeah, I wasn't sure what he meant either. We have 2 webheads serving static pages (like the non-logged-in homepage), and 4 serving specifically the dynamically-generated homepage for all logged-in users. Plus 1 that serves all SSL traffic, which subscribers can use.

People often say "subscriber" when they mean "logged-in Slashdot user," not specifically a paying subscriber.

read the entire series

[clem]

I can't wait for "Slashdot's Setup, Part 8 - Root Passwords".

Re:Interesting

[avronius]

best thrustworthy news site I do not think that word means what you think it means...

Re:Why CentOS?

[Precision]

We use a combination of CentOS and RHEL. The reason we chose CentOS over say debian is because it is basically identical to RHEL, we end up with a "single" platform that we have to deploy, test, and build packages for regardless of support. Depending on the system we will deploy either RHEL or CentOS accordingly based on support requirements.

Re:backup?

[Precision]

Of course we do offsite backups, but also we're currently preparing building a new primary data center in Chicago away from Earthquake land.