> I'm intrested in buying a 1U server to host our full-text/SQL/
> coldfusion IIS website.
>
> The server mostly run SQL Full-text queries, (10-20 million text
> rows) Also, there some Coldfusion scripts that consumes some
> resources for calucluation, generating and querying. Further more,
> the site send out hunderds of images and htmls very quickly,
> in a high above average rate.
>
> How can I check which server will be enough? Should I consider
> SCSI or settle for IDE? Should I consider more ram (1-2Gb over
> 512MB) and settle for a slower CPU?
Before you can come up with especially useful answers, you'll need to know:
1. what amount of traffic you expect to get,
2. what amount of traffic you're willing to support in a worst-case
scenario,
3. how this traffic will be distributed over the course of a day,
4. what kind of things happen on the site,
5. how long your users will be willing to wait,
6. and a bunch of things I'm surely forgetting.
For example, you might normally have a load of five thousand users per day,
but they might all visit at lunch time. Or, you might normally have one
thousand users a day, but you're going to be mentioned on TV this week. The
kinds of things that people do on the site will also have an effect on this.
For example, transactional processing will require more resources than
simply viewing data (which may very well be cached). On the other hand, if
you have a relatively captive user base, they might be willing to wait
longer than average. As you can see, there are a lot of variables that go
into capacity planning.
However, given the information you've provided, I'd recommend that:
1. You get two mediocre servers instead of one really good server. Put the
SQL Server on a separate box. This not only improves performance, but
increases stability - web/application servers tend to fail pretty often
compared to database servers, and you don't want to constantly tinker with
your database server. In addition, it will increase performance and prevent
annoying fights between CF and SQL Server about who's getting what memory -
those don't turn out very well.
2. Put as much RAM into your web/application server as you can. CF benefits
from lots of in-memory caching, if it has the memory. I'd recommend at least
1 Gb.
3. You'll get considerably better disk performance with SCSI on your
servers. IDE is getting better all the time, but I don't think it's caught
up yet.
4. If you do get separate servers, you might get better performance by
putting the database server on a separate network, and putting your web
server on both the database server's network and the external one.
Obviously, you'd need two NICs in your web server for this. In addition to
better performance, you'd probably have better security. The down side of
this is that it makes it harder to manage the servers if they're at a
dedicated hosting facility.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
voice: (202) 797-5496
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