Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Hardware for 100.000 users ?

[Wallker]

I have a little question about hardware.
Which hardware do you recommend for 100.000 simultaneous users on a server (cluster). The webpage is only in PHP writen.
Best regards from europe
Wallker

[MarcD]

What type are you talking about like cpu memory hd that kind of hardware ?

what size are the loads ?
100 is a lot to be running all at once

[Wallker]

Yes i mean CPU and memory. Harddisk is a known thing. My customer needs 100GB. But my problem is the other harddware.
I think that two dual-XEONS are not enough for this. What do you think?

[admin0]

maybe 2GB RAM and dual 2ghz p4's ?

depends on what will the 100,000 users be doing all at once ?

[timelord]

While the numbers are from older machines, they should still be helpful.

In 1999, testing I saw on SINGLE processor systems were reporting 1500 static web pages/second for machines in the 733Mhz range. (PHP generated pages would of course be less [about 25-50% less].) In theory (and yes - I know that things don't scale lineraly), a dual processor system should then be about 3000 static web pages/second. If we presume that today's machines can handle twice the load - you are talking about 6000 static web pages/second/machine.

So, for 100,000 web pages/second - you would need AT LEAST 17 servers (and more then likely more than that so that you could have N+1 redundency, etc.)

There are some real good articles at http://activeanswers.compaq.com that describe capacity planning for web servers (look under the DISA section). And they even have a sizer available.