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03-11-2004, 05:54 PM #1Newbie
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Need help getting a powerful server
Hello server gurus,
I am running VBulletin that is currently averaging 100-150 members at any given time - this number is only going to increase as our sites popularity is on the rise. I also run a couple of other PHP scripts that are pretty server intensive - mysql queries and all. Bandwidth is not an issue - since we are averaging between 600and 700Gb a month.
Here is what I am looking at from Servermatrix:
P4 3.0Ghz, 120GB IDE, 1GB RAM, 100Mbps uplink - $179/month
P4 2.8Ghz, 73GB SCSI, 1GB RAM, 100Mbps uplink - $189/month
P4 2.8Ghz, 2x 80GB IDE, 1GB RAM, 100Mbps uplink - $189/month
Xeon 2.4Ghz, 80GB IDE, 1GB RAM, 100Mbps uplink - $189/month
I am leaning towards the P4 2.8Ghz 73GB SCSI server and wanted to see what you all think.
Also, are there any other reliable hosts with comparable servers & prices?
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03-11-2004, 05:59 PM #2/home/xenos
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The extra power you receive from the dual Xeon machine will more than make up for the SCSI drive.
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03-11-2004, 06:10 PM #3Web Hosting Master
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An extra disk for regular backups is more important than 10% CPU load, especially with all these HTs.
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03-11-2004, 06:14 PM #4Junior Guru Wannabe
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Originally Posted by Imago
An extra disk for regular backups is more important than 10% CPU load, especially with all these HTs.
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03-11-2004, 06:16 PM #5Junior Guru Wannabe
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Have you had a look at gnax as they have very powerful servers at reasonable prices.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks.
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03-11-2004, 06:37 PM #6Newbie
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Originally posted by Imago
An extra disk for regular backups is more important than 10% CPU load, especially with all these HTs.
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03-11-2004, 07:42 PM #7Web Hosting Master
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Originally posted by Xenos
The extra power you receive from the dual Xeon machine will more than make up for the SCSI drive.
so my suggestion - go with SCSI drive, 2.8ghz is powerful enough.
regards,
M.Powered by AMD & FreeBSD.
"Documentation is like sex:
when it is good, it is very, very good;
and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
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03-11-2004, 08:15 PM #8Web Hosting Master
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I just might add for those who still think that adding CPU horses solves the hdd problem.. even if you have quad xeon, your slowest place is still hard drive.
The network speed between A and C is measured by the slowest rate in the middle - B. A=100mbps, C=100mbps, B=56kbps. Speed between A and B will be 56kbps maximum
regards,
M.Powered by AMD & FreeBSD.
"Documentation is like sex:
when it is good, it is very, very good;
and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
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03-11-2004, 09:08 PM #9Newbie
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Originally posted by Miha
I just might add for those who still think that adding CPU horses solves the hdd problem.. even if you have quad xeon, your slowest place is still hard drive.
The network speed between A and C is measured by the slowest rate in the middle - B. A=100mbps, C=100mbps, B=56kbps. Speed between A and B will be 56kbps maximum
regards,
M.
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03-11-2004, 09:16 PM #10Web Hosting Evangelist
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To be honest, I doubt you'll ever realize the full capability of the dual xeon if you're constantly writing and reading data to a slow 7200rpm drive. Personally, I can't see using any dual processor machine with a 7200rpm drive. The purpose of having such processing power is to preform operations that are too intensive for single processor machines, and with those intensive processes most likely comes a tremendous amount of hard drive usage - your bottleneck would definitely be the hard drive. Most people will agree.
Honestly, I would go with neither the p4 2.8ghz w/ SCSI or the dual xeon w/ IDE - I can't accurately tell you which would preform better. I don't think either would be amazingly fast.
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03-11-2004, 09:20 PM #11Web Hosting Master
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Originally posted by ushkand
If I understand this right, you are recommending the SCSI HD over a dual Xeon processor, right?
regards,
M.Powered by AMD & FreeBSD.
"Documentation is like sex:
when it is good, it is very, very good;
and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
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03-11-2004, 10:13 PM #12Web Hosting Master
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Originally posted by loopforever
To be honest, I doubt you'll ever realize the full capability of the dual xeon if you're constantly writing and reading data to a slow 7200rpm drive. Personally, I can't see using any dual processor machine with a 7200rpm drive. The purpose of having such processing power is to preform operations that are too intensive for single processor machines, and with those intensive processes most likely comes a tremendous amount of hard drive usage - your bottleneck would definitely be the hard drive. Most people will agree.
Honestly, I would go with neither the p4 2.8ghz w/ SCSI or the dual xeon w/ IDE - I can't accurately tell you which would preform better. I don't think either would be amazingly fast.
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03-11-2004, 10:28 PM #13Web Hosting Master
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I agreed as well if your server is used for a vBullentin board. What you need is an array of disk strip across multiple drives. The more drives the better, your CPU shouldn't be your bottleneck, the harddisk performance IS when your server is performing heavy SQL queries. The seek time alone on the Scsi drive makes a huge differences. Even with 10K RPM drive, these thing seek at 4ms, the fastest 7200RPM IDE drive is still at 8-10ms. So My recommendation to you would be a P4 2.8, with 3-5 Scsi disk, probably 5 x 18GB 15K RPM drive acoss RAID5 would be your best bet. (If you want to risk it for more performance, or your setup is totally redundant in a cluster, you could try RAID0 for even more performance, but that's highly unrecommendated unless you know perfectly what you're doing.)
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03-12-2004, 01:03 PM #14Newbie
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I already love servermatrix, they will do a Dual Intel Xeon with SATA for me. Now I'll try and see if they can bump upto to an SCSI.
Last edited by ushkand; 03-12-2004 at 01:13 PM.
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03-12-2004, 01:43 PM #15Newbie
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Hi,
If you have big sql queries think about having a separate sql server instead of upgrading your server in a big pot to run all threads/process you will be surprise of the result, try a dedicated bsd based sql server it is really robust for this job.
For the same price i can give you 2 servers less powered but your vbulletin would run faster ...Last edited by Prozac; 03-12-2004 at 01:49 PM.
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03-12-2004, 02:01 PM #16WHT Addict
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Originally posted by Miha
I just might add for those who still think that adding CPU horses solves the hdd problem.. even if you have quad xeon, your slowest place is still hard drive.
The network speed between A and C is measured by the slowest rate in the middle - B. A=100mbps, C=100mbps, B=56kbps. Speed between A and B will be 56kbps maximum
regards,
M.
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03-12-2004, 02:48 PM #17Newbie
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Originally posted by Prozac
Hi,
If you have big sql queries think about having a separate sql server instead of upgrading your server in a big pot to run all threads/process you will be surprise of the result, try a dedicated bsd based sql server it is really robust for this job.
For the same price i can give you 2 servers less powered but your vbulletin would run faster ...
I am running vb in integration with a php script for serving on demand video files and a picture gallery with around 30,000 images - (before someone asks me - no its not porn ). I need quite a bit of bandwidth for this - but the good thing is that the video script facilitates external links for downloads.
I have two sets of visitors - paid and free. Ofcourse free members make up more than 95% of my total visitors and also use more than 90% of my bandwidth - I need to keep them, don't ask why. What I was planning was to get a 10Mbps unmetered server from FDCservers (quality doesn't matter since its for free members) and move all free files to that, while keeping all paid (premium) videos on the main server. We only have about 150 paid members so the load should be very small because of their downloads.
The main website, forums, picture gallery and video script will reside on the main server where I also want to keep my sql DB.
So with this information, do you guys think that I should split the main server into two less powerful servers - I can get atleast 2 P4 2.4Ghz with 1GB RAM for the same price - so that I can have http on one and mysql on the other? or should I go with one of my earlier choices?
I want to stay as close as possible to $350 a month including $149 @ FDC.
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03-12-2004, 03:08 PM #18WHT Addict
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The thing is, for optimal performance, your database server should have excellent direct connection to the server that queries it, so the last thing you want is to put the database server onto a an unmetered plan since if the queries onto the server are coming from another network, and the path between them is congested, the customers most certainly would notice it more.
www.zubrcom.net | Tel: 1-877-982-7266 / 1-267-298-3232 | sales@zubrcom.net|@zubrcom
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03-12-2004, 03:41 PM #19Newbie
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Originally posted by zubrcom
The thing is, for optimal performance, your database server should have excellent direct connection to the server that queries it, so the last thing you want is to put the database server onto a an unmetered plan since if the queries onto the server are coming from another network, and the path between them is congested, the customers most certainly would notice it more.
Basically these are my two options right now:
2 server setup:
Servermatrix Dual Xeon - http & mysql - but no video files
FDC unmetered - Video files only.
3 server setup:
1 FDC unmetered - video files only
1 2.8Ghz P4 1GB RAM - website + regular https
1 2.8Ghz P4 1GB RAM - mysql DB only
Could probably set both of these in a private LAN, ie. after I understand what that means
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03-12-2004, 05:21 PM #20Web Hosting Master
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Originally posted by zubrcom
I have to disagree with the "slowest part is the hard drive" statement. Properly tuned P3 700 with 512M on with a 7200 RPM IDE HD running properly configured Apache/Php talking to PostgreSQL database can push over 300 Mbit/sec sustained. The real performance loss that one gets comes from heavy Apache/PHP process tryinbg to feed data over congested link (in your example, 56kbit/sec).
regards,
M.Powered by AMD & FreeBSD.
"Documentation is like sex:
when it is good, it is very, very good;
and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
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03-12-2004, 11:12 PM #21Temporarily Suspended
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When you use a Dual Xeon with IDE, when the Dual Xeon is always writing, reading from a 7200rpm, you will never reach its full potential. Thats why SCSI and ATA drives are offered, sure they are lower in space, but they are much faster. The best of both worlds, Dual Xeon and SCSI is somewhere around $299 a month, but you get what you pay for.
Last edited by cybexhost1; 03-12-2004 at 11:15 PM.
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03-12-2004, 11:46 PM #22WHT Addict
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Originally posted by Miha
really? would you show me such example? in that case mysql should handle ~400mbps on the same specs. server (since mysql is already faster than pgsql when it comes to simple queries [update/insert/select]). Don't tell me the query on 300mbps is simple "select * from table" with one record in the table. Since you think that slow link (of the peer, e.g. site visitor) is the problem, would you mind me sending you 20mbps of traffic on your SQL driven server over a fast link (100mbps with 20ms delay - ok?)?
M.
Congested link will always create a performance issue. Try benching your web application with and without a simple proxy sitting between your heavy app and the client. Proxied version would outrun non-proxied by a very good margin.
One of the clients of a company I used to work for in a previous life was doing just that.
Thanks,
Alexwww.zubrcom.net | Tel: 1-877-982-7266 / 1-267-298-3232 | sales@zubrcom.net|@zubrcom
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