On Fri, 2009-09-11 at 10:18 -0700, 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. No problem there but when building the systems we > got into a debate about how he wants the OS built. Basically he said > DO NOT build a swap partition or swap file. I asked why and his > response was "These are cookie cutter web servers that do nothing > other than serve apache requests. They have nothing else 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. " > > > He's the $CLIENT and I'l build it the way he requests but my questions > are... > > > 1. Would/Have you run a web server without swap? (they have 500Gb > drives in them so there's room for a swap partition.) > 2. Any benefits or drawbacks to doing this? (in context of a > pure webserver that does nothing else but serve pages as part > of the pool it is a member of.)
I've yet to see the server that only does X, where X is the main application. With him planning on running the servers to the memory wall, you've got no where to do when you need do Y on the server. As simply as logging on the console and poking around. Personally even on servers which I don't every plan on using swap, I include small spap partion. No one can forsee every eventuality (not we System Admins). At peak usage, I'd like to be to login on a console and try to shutdown a box gracefully if I need to. I really display just having to pull the plug, in order to recovery a server. -- Stephen Johnson <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
