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  1. #1

    Post 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?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2002
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    The extra power you receive from the dual Xeon machine will more than make up for the SCSI drive.

  3. #3
    Join Date
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    An extra disk for regular backups is more important than 10% CPU load, especially with all these HTs.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
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    Maryland, USA
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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.
    Agreed!

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
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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.

  6. #6
    Originally posted by Imago
    An extra disk for regular backups is more important than 10% CPU load, especially with all these HTs.
    Thanks guys for the response. I actually have another server that I will be using as a backup for this. So its just a matter of performance with this server.

  7. #7
    Originally posted by Xenos
    The extra power you receive from the dual Xeon machine will more than make up for the SCSI drive.
    ...the extra load IDE drive will cause most likely will slow your server with I/O load to death before you will actually utilize 50% of the 2.8Ghz CPU..

    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."

  8. #8
    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."

  9. #9
    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.
    If I understand this right, you are recommending the SCSI HD over a dual Xeon processor, right?

  10. #10
    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.

  11. #11
    Originally posted by ushkand
    If I understand this right, you are recommending the SCSI HD over a dual Xeon processor, right?
    right to the point

    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."

  12. #12
    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.
    i agree 100 % with this, i have lots around here get traped with out knowing this.
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  13. #13
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
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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.)

  14. #14
    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.

  15. #15
    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.

  16. #16
    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.
    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). Simply using a caching proxy will make the NIC the slowest part.

  17. #17
    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 ...
    May be I should give you guys a more info on what I am running and why I was thinking about this setup -

    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.

  18. #18
    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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  19. #19
    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.
    No no, my plan was to have the unmetered server to only serve files, no sql, nothing else. Everything else will either be on one other server or will be split between two - http on one and DB on another.

    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

  20. #20
    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).
    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?)?

    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."

  21. #21
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Ohio
    Posts
    504
    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.

  22. #22
    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.
    mySQL is not faster than properly tuned postgres on any reasonably designed database (to start, dont do SELECT * , do SELECT i_want_this, and_this_and_definitely_this).

    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,
    Alex
    www.zubrcom.net | Tel: 1-877-982-7266 / 1-267-298-3232 | sales@zubrcom.net|@zubrcom
    Hosting, VPS, Servers, Unmetered 10, 100 and Gigabit servers - Colocation - Engineering services
    "Elegant solutions to complex problems in the Internet-centric world"

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