On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 10:13, Jason Hihn wrote: > We have an opportunity to purchase a new, top-notch database server. I am > wondering what kind of hardware is recommended? We're on Linux platforms and > kernels though. I remember a comment from Tom about how he was spending a > lot of time debugging problems which turned out to be hardware-related. I of > course would like to avoid that. > > In terms of numbers, we expect have an average of 100 active connections > (most of which are idle 9/10ths of the time), with about 85% reading > traffic. I expect the database with flow average 10-20kBps under moderate > load. I hope to have one server host about 1000-2000 active databases, with > the largest being about 60 meg (no blobs). Inactive databases will only be > for reading (archival) purposes, and will seldom be accessed.
Whoever mentioned using multiple servers instead of one uber-server is very right. You're putting all your eggs in one basket that way, and unless that "basket" has hot-swap CPUs, memory boards, etc, etc, then if you have a hardware problem, your whole business goes down. Buy 3 or 4 smaller systems, and distribute any possible pain from down time. It seems like I'm going to contravene what I just said about eggs in a basket when I suggest that the disks could possibly be concen- trated into a NAS, so that you could get 1 big, honkin fast *hot- swappable* (dual-redundant U320 storage controllers w/ 512MB battery- backed cache each, for a total of 1GB cache are easily available) disk subsystem for however many smaller CPU-boxes you get. (They could be kept un-shared by making separate partitions, and each machine only mounts one partition.) -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jefferson, LA USA "Adventure is a sign of incompetence" Stephanson, great polar explorer ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]