[NBLUG/talk] Dedicated Linux Servers at Sonic.net

[Troy Arnold]

On Sat, May 15, 2004 at 11:58:06AM -0700, Augie Schwer wrote:
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> micxz said:
> > I'm sorry that's what I meant. I would think a production webserver
> > would need 512MB RAM at least don't you? Just my opinion'
> 
> I suppose it depends. Memory is used by running processes, so it would
> depend on what processes you are running, and how much memory they
> will use.
> 
> Serving static pages would be less process intensive, and require less
> memory. Serving dynamic pages would require more resources.
> 
> I have to admit though, that I have never administered any really popular
> web sites.

In a previous life, I administered a web/database server that served
(IIRC) about 100k page views on a really busy day.  I think we were
featured on netscape.net once and were getting around 15k pages per
hour.  Almost all of the pages had a lot of PHP and MySQL IO.  Then, of
course there were the images associated with each page.  All of this was
on a PII 350 with 128MB of RAM on FreeBSD 2.99 something.  It ran so
well that I never bothered to upgrade it to FreeBSD 3.x (I also didn't
realize how easy FreeBSD updates are).  I would have loved some more RAM
because MySQL would start swapping if I ran certain database cleanup
scripts at the wrong time or otherwise screwed up a query.  Once it
starts swapping, the server goes into a slow spiral of death unless you
can stop httpd for awhile to let things catch up.  Visitors *love* it
when that happens.

All in all, a lot of web output out of not much hardware.  I'd think a
popular game server would require more juice, but then "I have to admit
I have never administered any popular game servers..."  

-troy