Technical thread for Server Discussion (merged)

Piratecat · Nov 4, 2004

Technical thread for Server Discussion

Please use this thread for discussing our proposed server, including ways to make things as good as we can get them. This way we can separate the discussion from the Donation thread.

Thank you!

Psionicist · Nov 4, 2004

Henry said:
On the technical side, the offers are certainly appreciated, but just to give everyone some background, we've been discussing the server needs for about a week and a half prior to the announcement, with 4 coding professionals and 2 hardware professionals, who work in their respective fields as a living. For the funding, it's the best combination of power and economy available.

Now, if we bust even platinum goals, then Morrus way want to talk about opterons with 4GB RAM and Multi-hundred Gig fibre-channel SCSI drives with 128MB cache adapters... *drool*

(Sorry, I was daydreaming a second there... carry on!)

Heh. By downgrading the CPU (even a single opteron will do) you can afford a SCSI-controller, say Tekram. And the 36GB SCSI-drives aren't that expansive. SCSI-RAID, on the other hand...

It's not that the FX53 is a bad decision, it is after all the fastest processor right now. But top-of-the-line hardware is always rediciously expansive, and if you ask me FX53 and SATA-drives sounds more of a Doom III-machine than a webserver.

BradfordFerguson · Nov 4, 2004

I would like to pitch in my voice to say that I don't think that getting THE fastest or the next to fastest processor available is the best use of funds. The way that they price those CPUs is exponential in nature when they get to the higher end. Also, I'm pretty sure that the Athlon 64 XP is designed for gamers and not servers.

GSHamster · Nov 4, 2004

Have you profiled the site from a performance point of view? Where are your bottlenecks?

The site seems very database heavy. Maybe a faster disk access tech would be more useful than a faster processor?

This maybe overkill, but have you considered clustering? Using a couple of less powerful machines may give you decent performance, while improving reliability in case of failure. Also, this way you may be able to continue to incrementally improve the site's performance later by adding more machines.

Michael Morris · Nov 4, 2004

At peak use times MySQL occupies 75% of the processor's overhead. Speeding the processor up is key to speeding MySQL up.

noeuphoria · Nov 4, 2004

I'm taking it MySql is probably pegging out from so many searches, so the faster proc is for faster searches, faster discs will load pages faster. Have you guys perhaps thought of setting something up for hardware donations? I know with so many computer enthusiasts on this site, there's probably some people that could help with hardware.

DanMcS · Nov 4, 2004

Michael Morris said:
At peak use times MySQL occupies 75% of the processor's overhead. Speeding the processor up is key to speeding MySQL up.

Is the processor maxed out? Or is it 75% busy?

Michael Morris · Nov 4, 2004

MySQL alone acounts for 75% to 80% of the processor time. The processor is maxed out much of the time.

It's not just the search feature itself - the building of ANY page requires MySQL queries, which are searches of the database. Disk access time isn't the problem, calculations are needed to determine where to look.

What MySQL isn't eating Apache is. PHP script isn't like C - it essentially has to be loaded and compiled from scratch EVERY TIME the page loads.

Depending on the funds raised we'll be buying AT LEAST one new server to deal with the database. Despite her age the current server may see duty as a PHP basher or even merely as an image server (meaning all it would do is send the image files which require no processing).

Philip · Nov 4, 2004

Michael Morris said:
Depending on the funds raised we'll be buying AT LEAST one new server to deal with the database. Despite her age the current server may see duty as a PHP basher or even merely as an image server (meaning all it would do is send the image files which require no processing).

That would seem to be the most sensible solution to me, one dedicated database server and another one for interpreting PHP. Although I don't think you need a top-of-the line processor to build a good database server, you will be paying over the top $$ for just a little bit of extra speed.

der_kluge · Nov 4, 2004

I don't know much about the internals of MySQL, but with any database, clustering the drives is going to be a big performance gain. Multiple CPUs will also significantly increase performance. Ideally, you want at least a 1:1 correlation between CPU and drive. I assume you guys are going with some sort of RAID solution to implement this?