Howdy,

My partner who usually handles our server setup and administration recently decided to call it quits for webmastering, because most of his sites were based on advrevenue.

This leaves me with some questions.

I am opening a new website which I envision will have a fairly high ammount of traffic (in the range of 400,000+ pageviews per day), and plan to put this site on a server with a P3 1GHz processor, 512 ram (will upgrade to 1024+ when need be), redhat 6.2, a 100mbps ethernet card and a EIDI hard disk (This could be a bottleneck I understand).

The site runs off very efficient PHP/MySQL scripts, and calls a max of 2 queries per pageview (very simple queries, just pulling 1 result then updating it), and I have configured mySQL config files to settings which would coincide with my estimated traffic.
The server is also running it's own DNS and mailservers, but I don't think this really increases the server load too much.

My question is this - 400,000 pageviews a day is my minimum estimed traffic, how much could a p3 1GHz with 512 ram theoretically handle in pageviews per day with the configuration/scripts I have specified. (Bandwidth is not a concern). I'm hoping it could handle 1 million plus, but like I said I'm new to this as my partner usually handled it. I know theres a lot of variables, but any realistic estimation would help.

Could anyone else running on a similar server give me some statistics on how many pageviews you served per day without problems =)

Also - are there any guides to tweaking apache out there? I have heard that the default Apache install leaves quite a bit to install, and some tweaks could greatly improve performance

Thanks,
Jeff Booth

Don't forget to configure Apache the MaxClient option.

Your main concern should be your IP bandwidth and your providers latency, and your spikes. A 850 processor is plenty of power. Remember your processor can only work as fast as it gets data.

The most important thing is bandwith. If your server is restricted to bandwith like 128 or 256 Kbps.
Is there any data loss or not.
What will you do with 1.3 Ghz or 512 MB Ram or 1GB RAM when you don't have requests?
The most important things is NOC where your server is located.

:D :D :D :D

The harddisk is most likely to be your bottleneck.

My site experienced serious performance problems when we reached 4,000,000 page views per month. Most pages are php scripts which use 2-5 database queries per invocation.

Instead of getting a faster (scsi) disk I decided to reduce disk i/o as much as possible. For example I replaced some disk-based tables by heap-based tables. In addition I installed the Zend Cache which caches php scripts in memory rather than getting them from disk all the time.

Currently the traffic is 5 million page views per month on a PIII 733 with 384 Mb and an EIDE harddisk. The load of the server is mostly below 0.15.

With this in mind I think your server can easily handle one million impressions per day. Just try to avoid using disk i/o where possible.

for mysql related linux optimisations check out

http://www.mysql.com/doc/L/i/Linux.html

http://www.mysql.com/doc/O/p/Optimizing_the_Server.html

<< MOD EDIT >>

Please do not violate the forum rules. This will be the last warning.

<< /MOD EDIT >>

Originally posted by jolly
The most important thing is bandwith. If your server is restricted to bandwith like 128 or 256 Kbps.
Is there any data loss or not.
What will you do with 1.3 Ghz or 512 MB Ram or 1GB RAM when you don't have requests?
The most important things is NOC where your server is located.

:D :D :D :D

I think Jeff is more interested in whether the server configuration rather than the bandwidth right now, I am sure he has that side of things sorted if he is expecting to be serving that much traffic.

With regard to the server spec, I would recommend using SCSI HDD's (even with an additional SCSI card), as it will ease the bottleneck created by IDE HDD's when it comes to disk input/output.

And for that amount of traffic, a RAID config would be justified too.

Matt

Thanks for the responses guys, appreciate it =)

You are right, bandwidth is not the issue here - just interested in the actual PC itself.

With regards to disk i/o/optimization - is Zend Optimizer the 'Best' choice, I have heard APC compares with Zend's $1000 dollar caching engine, but really don't have much experience with it.

We currently use the free Zend Optimizer.

That being said, I will probably look into getting two SCSI drives to replace the IDE once the traffic warrants it.

Thanks for all the great input!