Hi
From your experiences, what server could host 2000 people online?

I am thinking Dual exon+2G DDR ram+2X 1.5K RPM SCSI HD load balancing

possible to handle the load?

Try and find out what server hosts WHT :)

I remember someone has mentioned about 4X SCSI HD load balancing or something?

for 2k users online at once, i would say maybe two of those... heh

Well, im pretty sure that a Dual XEON server could handle that, use Hyperthreading, and if youre thinking of 4 SCSI drives, then go for RAID 5 , it will speed everything up and not to mention the redundancy.

BTW i know someguy who continuously has 1400 Concurrent connections to his VB, ill ask him.

You could also go for a Dual Opteron, if you find one :s ...

BTW whats youre budget?

Wouldn't it be cheaper if you just split the forum up onto like 5 or 6 hyperthreaded P4 servers. Each server could handle specific areas of the forum and if one went down the whole forum wouldn't go down.

Edit:
Btw, I have no idea the complications that could arise in seperating a forum, but I figure that this issue has come up before and someone knows a way to do it :)

Originally posted by schmeg007
Wouldn't it be cheaper if you just split the forum up onto like 5 or 6 hyperthreaded P4 servers. Each server could handle specific areas of the forum and if one went down the whole forum wouldn't go down.

Edit:
Btw, I have no idea the complications that could arise in seperating a forum, but I figure that this issue has come up before and someone knows a way to do it :)

You will have to split database then which requires a lot of hacking

At www.vbulletin.com/forum are experts available which are able to discuss your needs.

Usually better performance is archieved by using two servers, one for the web and one for the database.

You need to use a cluster with load balancing..and I would recommend only Dual Xeon / Quad Xeons / Opetrons with lot of memory to be used. Saving money and buying a few P4's instead of few Xeon's would be a very bad move IMHO.

Get two servers :) one for Apache (web-server), and second for MySQL with SCSI drives.

by the way, what your website?

Just colocate your own hardware here, get a giga bit switch to connect the servers to them selfs.

Have a front end load blanced for 2 web servers, that connect to the switch over a distibuted and inter connected database cluster. Much ram is a good Idea :)

Might be a little over kill but here is my photoshop drawing :)

on your drawing "load balancer" - what type of hardware is that?

That hardware wouldn't suffice to handle 2000 ppl, you will need 2 dual Xeons - one for web files, one for mysql and do some heavy tweaking to optimize performance. Also a RAID5 will be good.

2 machines are the way to go with a crossover cable to connect the 2 so you are paying to tranfers the queries back and forth.

I still like my artwork the best :)

Hi:

Since you are getting a variety of answers, I know of a configuration that utilizes the following...

SQL Server:
Dual XEON 3.06 Ghz
4GB of RAM
2 72GB SCSI Drives (RAID 1) --> RAID 5 will slow things down

2 Web Server(Load Balanced)
Single XEON 3.06
2GB of RAM
2 72GB SCSI Drives (NO RAID)

I have seen this configuration handle 1500+ connections at one time.

In spending a lot of time working with this solution, I would honestly have to recommend talking with InvisionBoard.Com. Just from experiance, the code can handle the load and I/Os that Bulletin Boards cause a lot better than VB, but thats just my opinion.

Good luck!
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Theres a multitude of setups you could do, if the 2000 people you quoted was the peak online users and it generally goes down to half that at normal times you would be fine with a Dual Xeon 3.0ghz with HT at least with 2 x SCSI HD's (one for Apache one for mySQL) and around 2GB RAM.

If those 2000 people are online all the time and your peak is more then that stated then you would need 2 dedicated servers, one running the web part and one running the mySQL part, I would get these again with Dual Xeons with HT and 2 x SCSI HD's, I'd use RAID1 for each for redundancy as that amount of people wont be good depending on just the one HD.

I'd agree with Aaron as VB's do tend to have a higher server load then others but the latest version seems to have sped things up.
Also you could redesign the actual VB to a lighter skin with less graphics and more textual links and that will make a huge difference.

FatalSw1tch's document was also valid ;)

Hi

Thanks for all of your replies. FatalSw1tch's picture looks neat
I am aksing this for my potential customer. His forum has normally 1500 people online and 2500 in peak time. so far, looks like I at least need two Dual Xeon box, one is for DB and one is for webserver. In this way, would it be cheaper that i do co-lo myself?High setup feefor hardware purchase but lower monthly.
If so, what connections I need and what company has better experiences with setting up all these things.

I for myself also use IPB and I do agree it works better than VBB in my personal experieces. :D

Thanks again:)

www.coloquest.com should work for your needs.

Two Xeons is the way to go. I personally manage a number of VB sites, and one of them goes well over 2500 users at peak times.

That particular one's setup consists of:

MySQL Box:
Dual Xeon 2.4GHz
4GBs DDR RAM
2 36GB 15K RPM HDDs
RAID controller with 128MBs Cache (setup for mirrorring, which at least speeds up the reads considerably, and keeps a nice backup)

Cross-connected via gigabit ethernet to:
Apache Box:
Dual Xeon 2.4GHz
2GBs DDR RAM
36GB 15K RPM HDD

After dealing with this customer, I've learned a lot about VB. Main thing is actually not the number of people online, but the size of the database. We were carrying about 6 years worth of posts, and we decided it would be best to run an 'archive' site with old posts in read-only mode, and then keep the live site with the last year's worth of posts (still about 2 million of them). That brought loads down a lot.

We also started out with 2GBs of RAM on both servers, and noticed loads were high on both servers. After upgrading the MySQL box to 4 gigs, it had positive effects on both sides since the Apache instances had to wait less time to get replies from MySQL thus working faster and more efficiently.

If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at joseq@tailoredservers.com. I'd be happy to share my experiences. =)

JoseQ

Main thing is actually not the number of people online, but the size of the database.

could you explain more about that??? i have a phpBB database that is 2 years old (about 40,000 subscribers), now we had to move to a dedicated server, but how the size of the database affects that much? how what you did brought the loads down??? i've thought about that, keeping the registered users but leave an old board and create a new one, but as it has been such a challenge to keep that database alive surviving all the server changes and stuff so i wouldn't like to "abandon" it unless is extremely necessary

don't forget to read some MySQL performance tunning pages to correctly set-up max threads (perhaps there is a queue there) your bulletin board requires and server can handle OK....

Make sure you understand inno db advantages with table locking over myisam


Also do some statistic to see how many insert/read operations are done... usually read ops are more, but don't forget that myisam locks the table for write when read operation to the same table is peformed.


Read some manuals/performance for RAID-1 & RAID-0, RAID-10, RAID-5 (preferable of course HARDWARE RAID!!!) advantages/dissadvantages.

if you have any other questions or some assistance, feel free to PM me... thanks!

Our cluster:

Our advanced hosting solution at RackSpace consists of a firewall in front of a Cisco load balancer unit. We have 5 web servers which are Dell PowerEdge 2650 boxes with 2 GIG of ram, dual 2.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors and 3 15000 RPM SCSI drives running Raid 5. Each site hosted connects to one of 3 seperate database servers over a backup network. Each database server is a Dell PowerEdge 2650 server with 4 GB ram, dual 2.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors with 3 15000 RPM SCSI drives running in a raid 5 configuration.

Additionally, we have complex backup servers connected in which our databases are replicated and backed to tape on a daily basis, as are the website content.


Of course we don't just run WHT.. But many of our other high traffic sites...


One tip is to use persistant connections to your database server..

I general system is: Internet -> Load balancer -> 1 of the 5 web servers -> DB servers. Thats a rough breakdown of our cluster..

How exactly does iNET cluster it's database servers?

:popcorn: what about supercomputer for WHT?
:cool:

It would be better to have 2 dual Xeon box, one for MySQL DB with 4GB memory and one for Apache Web Server, but if you'd like to save some money on the web server box or just use one server, you can try our litespeed web server instead of apache, it will take really small amount of resrouce (load, cpu and memory wise) comparing to Apache. If you run the web server on a dedicate box, a P4 2.4G with 1GB of memory is more than enough, I believe.

For example, fanfiction.net is runing litespeed on a P3 1.2G configured as reverse proxy to a CacheFlow box serving 5-6 million pages per day. During its peak hours, it only use about 38MB memory, 50% cpu, load around 0.7 , pumping out 9Mb/s dynamically compressed html pages.

George

Originally posted by Jori
Hi
From your experiences, what server could host 2000 people online?

I am thinking Dual exon+2G DDR ram+2X 1.5K RPM SCSI HD load balancing

possible to handle the load?

Wow, what's the name/url of your forum?