(OT)A note on the User Limit

[EricNoah]

Let's make sure this thread gets into the Meta forum. Keep posting your opinions though!

 

[Leopold]

I'll admit, I'm confused. Can someone, for my sake and for the sake of others, explain what exactly a website and a messageboard need to run properly, and how much those things cost and how they work? I'd be interested to know.

as an ex sysadmin for some big companies I would point you in the direction of Anandtech.com and do a search on their recent (1yr ago) server upgrade. From that you will see what it is that a website and a forum board need to operate, and yes they are 2 seperate entities and should be handled as such.


Web servers: These pieces of equipment require flexibilty and speed. The load changes from time to time and the faster cpu you have to do the processing the better. Hard drive pages are constant but usually small (web pages are around 100k or less on avg.) but there are allot of them so the hard drives take a beating. Avg memory for a web server should hover around 500-1gb of Ram. Dual cpu's are recommended but 1 fast one (1.2+) can handle the load. Redundancy in the machines and load balancing help ease the burden off the usage, after all you can service more people with less taxing if you have 2 machines doing the work. Overall you just need something that is not unholy fast but something that is: stable, constant, and has excellent usage of resources.

Message board: This is the mother of all servers. The hammering of the hard drives and the furious churning of the cpu's makes having a mutli-cpu (2-4) with lots of memory and fast (SCSI) hard drives a must. HardOCP put in multiple dual P3 pc's with 1GB of Ram each and several SCSI RAID (Redunant Array of Inexpensive Disks) setups to handle the 10's of thousands of messages per day. The key with these is the multiple CPU's and lots of memory. The more you throw at this the better you are. 1GB min in memory is plenty but your HD's should be in some sort of RAID array to increase reliabilty and performance. I would suggest Dual or Quad CPU's for this.

OS: Your operating system is like the driver in your car, if you have a bad driver, no matter how fast your car is you might not be able to handle it. Regardless of the propogand M$ puts out, there are more UNIX web servers out there with greater uptime than any M$ box out there. Check out this link to see the difference:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

Unix may be user unfriendly at first, as M$ GUI makes life easy to setup and configure, but the reliabilty and uptime that it gives you makes it well worth the plunge in running UNIX over Microsoft products.


the lesson to be learned is: More is better, but understanding what you want to do and grow is key. I don't know what price tag the new server is, but you can go on ebay, pick up some Company or Sun machines for realatively 1/5 the cost (DoveBid.com is better) and use them in your own datacenter that you host in your own town. I just recently setup a ISP with several Dell Servers running Win2k and RHat. The redhat's the main web server while the win2k is running mail, and IIS only apps. This is to prevent those pesky IIS virus' that come along and to increase performance and uptime. Before I would go ahead and buy something from someone, I would get a quote from a competitor and see how that price stacks up against another. I don't know what brand of server morrus' company uses, if it's home built and they charge an arm and a leg I would question why. If it's a prebuilt OEM system from Dell, HPQ, or IBM it would make sense (HPQ=HP+Compaq). But take a word of advice and shop around.


Questions, comments, and conerns feel free to email me.

PS. If anyone's hiring in Florida and needs a sys admin with years of on the job exp and several certs I am available will work for D20!

 

[Leopold]

I
1. I also work in the computer industry and if it’s a matter of cost, I can pick up parts for a dual processor server and have it together with little out of pocket.

2. I also frequent the Mortality site, heck I live 5 minutes from Adlon's shop and know he has a couple powerful servers, both running Linux. And what better OS to run for Web and e-mail than Linux eh?

Well, I hope this can be fixed soon. I like frequenting the boards here during the day but I'm finding it near to impossible to get in anymore.

I took your post and divided it for discussion sake.

1. Sure you can pick up a dual board, some cpus', ram, and a few SCSI HD's for cheap on ebay, but the reliabilty and WARRANTY is key with big web farms. If one web server were to die in my farm I can call compaq and i have a 4 hr response time and they come out and fix it with the equipment. That sure saves me time and effort to fix the problem as well as keep spares on hand for every lil part that can go wrong. Warranty is key with big farms. IF mortality has his stuff together and has name brand servers I wouldn't think twice, but I don't know his systems, can you provide specs?

2. BSD is still king of the web servers. MS ran BSD up until a few years ago on their hotmail servers and finally had to drastically increase the amount to keep up with sheer bulk of it. Linux is good, but it's not solid yet like BSD. If I were learning UNIX i would learn Linux over BSD as in the next few years it will overtake BSD's foothold in several areas as well as MS hold on the desktop.


This is not a flame but just asking of questions and wondering what would be best for ENWorld in the long run.

 

[Vargo]

I'll concur with the BSD comment.

For secure, stable, and FAST, BSD is the OS of choice. Back in the heydey, ftp.cdrom.com was run on FreeBSD IIRC, and that server held the record for most amount of data served in a day for quite some time.

I was working at Microsoft between the first attempted switchover of Hotmail to NT4 (which failed) and the second switchover to Windows 2000. I asked one guy on the team why the NT4 conversion had failed. He replied, "Well, their software is buggy and just is poorly written."

I responded, "Oh? Then why was it so stable on their Unix boxes?"

To which he fumed and walked off.

As far as equipment/reliability goes - I'm of a mixed mind about this. For a hobby board such as this, most standard commercial equipment will hold up as well as the so-called "server-grade" equipment - but if you get into /. territory, you really do need to go with the "service contract" equipment.

 

[Adlon]

Ok, Morrus, this is NOT a membership drive.

Lets try something. Everyone slam my board for a day or two, and lets see how my end holds up.

No guarantees, but, I think I might have come power to cope.

I will make an ENWOrld Test board, where we all should post massive amounts of gibberish posts.

I will NOT make this forum, of course, until Morrus tells me he is ok with this.

But, if it appears I can help ENWorld with this, then I surely will.

So, Morrus: email me at adlon@mortality.net, and I will open up an ENWorld Test forum. Once we do this for a day or two, I will delete the forum, unless you feel it should be done longer.

But, bottom line, I'm willing and able to help. No doubt there.

 

[Leopold]

having a few hundred people post gibberish posts is not going to be enough. You need something along the level of a noon-4 influx of data. If your servers hold up then than you will be good to go. Now we need to find out what that threshold is and how to recreate it.

 

[LightPhoenix]

I love EN World but the 200-user limit is getting old real fast. It took me almost a whole hour of refreshing to get in.

This doesn't help any, it just slows down the server more. Hammering is bad.

Secondly, a lot of what you guys said just went completely over Morrus's head. I don't think there's a need to impress Morrus with tech-talk, seeing as how he's not a techie from what I gather. Simplify

 

[Leopold]

This doesn't help any, it just slows down the server more. Hammering is bad.

Secondly, a lot of what you guys said just went completely over Morrus's head. I don't think there's a need to impress Morrus with tech-talk, seeing as how he's not a techie from what I gather. Simplify

please let us know what we made 'techie' and what we didn't. I thought i made it as simple as possible. If I have to explain it in another fashion I will, no problem with that.


The point of the matter is thus: compare your needs to the needs that other websites had: ArsTechnica, HardOCP, Anandetech, Google, Slashdot. See how they approarched their server upgrades and learn from them. The power of a webmaster is going to other webmasters and asking their advice and 9/10 they will give it to you. Just ask the questions and those that can answer will..

 

[reapersaurus]

you guys did use techie language, acronyms, and short-cut references which completely isolates a non-techie from understanding much of what was said.

Trust me.

It is hard to properly explain, since Morrus isn't really in a discussion with us, we're just talking around the problem.

Now, this problem here is more of a spec, reliability, and cost issue.
Most difficult as I see it is Morrus decision to move the boards without an easy test case to help him determine the viability of it working.

So Morrus - one thing that should probably be done is to shut down the boards for a lunch-crunch and redirect everyone to mortality instead of the temp ezboard.

And people must be encouraged to post a LOT, and read etc etc etc.
When we were redirected to the ezboards, i don;t think they were really hammered anywhere near as hard as the ENBoards are during lunchtime.
That would be key for a good test: to make sure mortality was hit somewhat similarly as the ENBOards are.

How to do that without all the content over there I don't see how can be accomplished, unless it's a concerted effort by all the members and lurkers that day.

 

[Morrus]

I'll drop you an email, Adlon. I don't think we'll be able to simulate regular traffic, though

Another priority is keeping all the threads and member accounts - which pretty much means using vB still.