On Sep 11, 2009, at 1:18 PM, Shane Milburn wrote:

> I'm doing a project for a $CLIENT who has requested that I build out  
> a small web farm capable of serving 1M hits an hour average and peak  
> traffic to 3M/hour.

Well, my first question is what  you're going to be serving, and if  
it's static content or dynamic (PHP, python, perl, ruby, etc.)

> on them so we'll run apache up to XXX for MaxClients and  
> MaxSpareServers (just shy of running the box out of memory) and  
> leave it. "

If they're static, have you considered another web server vs Apache?   
NginX can do an amazing job of serving traffic.    And it can do a  
nice job with things like PHP-FPM, etc.

(Also as a side note, I'd be curious what you were doing for a load  
balancer, since it sounds like it's going to be necessary.)

As for running w/o swap:  I'm not sure you control Apache in as fine  
grained a manner as you might need for that.  We've tried it on  
Oracle, where you can do amazing things w/ memory control, and still  
had trouble.    You can set the swappiness of the OS to very low,  but  
the second you hit something unexpected, you might have trouble. ( And  
we might as well plan now for unexpected.  It always happens.)

Then again, this all really depends on the workload for the machines.

You might be better off just putting a swap partition in, and then  
alerting if you ever start swapping.    Maybe restart apache on that,  
but alert, so you know you need to fix it.

But that's just my gut feeling.

Matthew

Matthew Barr
[email protected]
cell: 646-765-6878


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