I have a site that currently has more than 80,000 visitors per day, I am using a P4 server to host it, but the server is almost
used up, so I have to find some alternatives. I am thinking of buying 2 servers, but the problem is how they can work together,
I want the two servers have the same domain name, and because my site is forum-based, I want the two servers host
different forums, so the traffic will go to the two servers evenly.
anyone can tell me how I can do that? DNS round-robin is not
enough for that. thanks

With that much traffic I would think having a dedicated MySQL server for the forums would do wonders. It would not have to be all that powerful of a machine and you can beef up the primary box with a Dual Xeon set.

That should carry you quite a good way I would think.

What speed P4 do you have, what cache size, and how much memory is in the machine? Also, what is the average server load? Lastly, what forum script are you using? If you don't want to split up into 2 servers (Database+web), I'd suggest a Dual Xeon, but I can't recommend a specific spec server without having the info I mentioned above.

-Josh

I am using P4 2.4G, cache size 512K, memroy is 1Gb, the
highest server load is about 4, I am using a very old forum
script---matt script(perl based), I really want to split into
two servers, hope both servers can cope wtih database and web. thanks

Ouch... I hope that's not the WWWBoard script that stores everything in a flat text file... My advise is, that if it is, get a new script :D . A Dual Xeon 3.06 with 1.5GB-2GB RAM could handle that, but I'd recommend getting a new script.

-Josh

get rid of that script and buy vbulletin.

Sounds like Ikonboard....

If it is, there are plenty of convertors to change that to something a lot more efficient.

If you want to keep the forum as is, a Dual Xeon with a P4 2.4 MySQL server would be a nice set up. You outgrow that then you will need to convert the forum, just the conversion would allow you to stay with a configuration like that for a very long time...

yes, it's a WWWboard, but I am very familiar with it, so I modify
everything in it if I want. Mysql-based forum uses less system
resource than wwwboard? And because my bandwidth is so big,
I think split the traffic between two servers will help me save
some bucks, for example, a dual xeon server from RS will cost
$270(1200GB traffc), but two celeron 1.7G server from servermatrix will only cost $200(750GB traffic each)

Does WWWboard still have the total lack of locking that lets you blank a forum with two browser windows and a bit 'o luck?

Anyway, flat files scale very badly. They are much faster with just a few dozen posts, but the insertion time grows drastically as the post count increases. SQL should have a basically constant insertion time, so it becomes much faster on busy forums.

Plus it separates the data store and logic portions so you can break it across several servers.

WWWboard is still flat file based, but I control the number of
posts, so it won't grow widly, its speed is pretty fast since it
doesn't need to fetch webpages from database. How do you
store data on different servers?

tacmao, you're really much much better off simply converting to a different forum that uses a proper database, can handle much greater loads on your current server, and A LOT easier to scale to multiple servers later on.

You are definetly going to want to switch to mysql and then just use a seperate mysql server as you grow. The only way to split the data would be to run the script on both servers and then EVERY time something is recorded to a text file on server X it must be communicated to server Y, which will cause a HUGE amount of overhead.

I would get a dual xeon from SM for $199 free setup. Or go with rackshack in 3 weeks with the dual xeon $1 setup or nocster.

Are you running wwwboard as CGI scripts, or as mod_perl? If you're running it as CGI right now, you may be able to switch to mod_perl for a significant speed increase without having to change scripts and without having to buy new hardware.

Have you tried optimizing your server?
On the one hand, I don't think it's possible easily to have this wwwboard script spread out on 2 servers, sicne it doesn't use a mysql database. On the other hand, if you switch to mysql-based forum script, you might not need a second server.