Scott R. Godin [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth:
*>
*>B> it isn't exactly a low-budget machine. The box is a VA Linux 1000 1U
*>Rack Server, with dual P-III 750's, two 36 GB SCSI drives, 512 MB RAM
*>(which will be augmented shortly), dual fast ethernet ports, CDROM,
*>etc., with four front-mounted fans sucking air in and back toward a
*>rear-pointing fifth fan. Value of this box is approximately $3700, but
*>he picked it up for a mere $1350 at their "fire-sale".
That depends on your budget :) A 4-way Sun 420R with 4GB mem, etc. will
extract about $50k from your wallet :)
*>I don't think so. :-) I can't offhand tell you how many hits the primary
*>site gained under this guy's leadership on a daily basis, but I do
*>remember being quite surprised at the number.
I used to be an SA at a large web-hosting outfit and we got to see all
manner of web site manglement. I can offer that under a heavy load
mod_perl is less than stellar. This may change with v2.0 but even with
tuning it has disappointing performance. If you choose mod_perl you simply
cannot have enough ram so max the box with ram if you can.
Web site performance depends on a lot of different variables so there is
no one correct answer for you. Moving away from NT is a good start as it
simply just doesn't scale. I remember one customer who hired 3 people to
do 8-hour shifts of clicking modal boxes on their NT web servers until
someone wrote a script to obsolete them. And, usually, they required a
reboot on the midnight saturday maint window.
If you have the luxury, set up a staging/dev machine where you can compare
the different technologies. If you have money, look into the web server
Zeus and be open minded about which technology is really doing the most
for your site as it may not be Perl. Much of your performance gain is
going to be from faster I/O if you don't have a lot of CPU hogs in your
set-up. The faster the I/O and with caching you'll see a large improvement
most likely.
*>and the fact that we're locked into .asp on the site it's at now, and
*>they are VERY sure they want to use php instead, which also basically
*>means a move to unix-based servers..
Chilisoft makes an ASP plug-in for Apache for linux the last I knew...:)
e.
