Hello

I am talking to a couple of clients right now. They are using roughly 1200+GB of bandwidth. They expect to grow a bit more in the next few months. Can someone suggest a server configuration that can handle 1500+ GB of data transfer.

Thanks in advance..

I would say atleast a GHZ with tons of ram depending on the content. If it's static html or just downloads, that much ram shouldn't be necessary. Maybe 512 would do the trick.

PIII 1000mHz(or better, dual reccomended)
1GB RAM
Dual SCSI Hard drives (RAID configuration)

With static content even RAQ3 can probably handle this. I had a RAQ3 with 32Mb of RAM serving around 100 Gb worth of static html/image files per month with load average of 0.02-0.03. The trick here -- do NOT use Apache, install something more lightweight and not multithreaded, like boa or thttpd. And you'll definitely need a 100 Mbps LAN card as 1500 Gb per month is about 6 Mbps if I'm not mistaken and you'll probably would like it to be burstable to over 10 Mbps.

http://www.devshed.com/Talk/BrainDump/thttpd/

I had a RaQ3 with 64 megs of ram and it pushed about 80GB.. I'm sure it could have done a lot more.

I've setup and run servers that can (and at times have) done those levels of transfer. FreeBSD + Apache will work fine for that.

You didn't mention what type of content you're serving. Large files, small ones? Usual mix?

Make sure you do have gobs of ram. For a server that's expected to grow further than this make sure you have at least a gig in there (It's so cheap these days, 1.5GB or more would be great).

With that type of setup the only bottleneck to expect is your connection. It takes a good link to support that type of traffic.


As for hardware..

Go with pIII 1GHZ, Invest in a good SCSI setup! Stay far away from anything that's IDE for this. RAM... Get a gig or more to start. It's so cheap now there's no reason not to do that.

Under freebsd, make sure you up maxusers(up to 2048), and nmbclusters(to 32768) when you recompile the kernel.

Beyond that, if it's mostly static content, you should be set. Dual Processors are always a help. But the above should handle the load acceptably.

As long as the OS doesn't start digging into swap, you shouldn't have any issues.

From my experiences. My server transfer around 20GB to 25 GB per day.

I am running a Dell server with IGB CPU and IGB RAM. The server mostly serve html, php and images. Some of them alos use mysql.

You really need more RAM if you want to serve a lot of images and html file. If you run php a lot, faster CPU is required.

Check this out:

http://php.weblogs.com/tuning_apache_unix

"General rule of thumb for hardware upgrades: For PHP scripts, the main bottleneck is the CPU. For static HTML/images, the bottleneck is RAM and the network. A slow 400 Mhz Pentium can saturate a T3 line (that's 45 Mbps) with static HTML pages."

Hope this help.

Originally posted by maxbear

I am running a Dell server with IGB CPU and IGB RAM. T

1 Ghz Cpu ?? :)

To give you a good estimate of what you will need, we need to know things like:
What web server are you running?
Is it database driven?
Do you have other servers, e.g. Coldfusion, Zope, RealServer dedicated to special tasks.

Are you running a lot of cgi-bin stuff?

Images? Largefiles?

If graphics are slowing down the main server, consider using two:

On the first server, serve up content via apache and whatever database software you are using, if any.

On the second server, serve up only images using a lightweight server (thttpd) and optimized disk i/o and other parameters for serving graphics. Tweaking disk i/o can really help.