[OT] Server choices?

Paul Bryan pa_bryan at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Jan 16 12:37:31 EST 2003


On Thursday 16 January 2003 11:26, Rob Shugg wrote:
> Hey
> My company is starting to think about buying some server hardware and I
> wanted to get some feedback on what makes a good server.
> At the moment we are using an old pentium II on a transact connection for
> apache/python connecting to a MySQL server. The pages we are serving are
> quite processor intensive in that they can take up to 3 seconds each to
> generate. 


Are the requests acutally processor intensive? Slow response is more likely 
to be disk access not cpu usage. It used to be that you'd get SCSI disks for 
the above mention stuff, but these days IDE seems to be on par with a lot of 
SCSI stuff. As usual, this often depends on who you ask!

If they do turn out to be chewing a lot of CPU cycles, multi processor may 
help, though that will depend on the software. I think apache and mysql can 
be optimized for smp. Mind you, this probably won't speed up individual 
requests so much as spread the load from multiple requests accross different 
CPU's.

> At this stage bandwidth isnt such an issue as we can upgrade as
> the need arises.
> What I would like to know is, what do you really get when you fork out for
> a server as opposed to a standard pc? and what are the main questions you
> need to ask yourself in specifying one?
>

You need to look at things like redundancy, availabiliy, fault tolerance and 
reliability. eg. use a RAID, if a disk fails will the server keep running and 
how long will it take to replace. If you have hot swap, you may get away with 
minimal down time. 

Don't forget about future growth either. It's often best to over-spec a 
machine to allow for some room to grow.

Any decision though has to be based on some sort of risk analysis. If you do 
have problems, how long can you afford to be down for? Often more 
importantly, how much can you afford (finacially)? The latter is usually the 
deciding factor. You buy in as much functionality as you can afford and deal 
with any issues you have in the best way you can given the constraints.

> Thanks
>
> rob

Fairly general I know, but I hope it helps a bit.

Cheers,
Paul.



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