The hardware: HP ProLiant DL360, 3 GB RAM, dual 2.something gig Xeon CPU's, dual 72 GB 10k SCSI drives. I can hardware RAID the disks, but I'm not sure I want to given the massive amount of disk activity this box is destined for. (Or do I?) I only have this one box to work with at the moment.
Spec sounds fine.
The people: anywhere from 500 to 2,000 concurrent users, with the potential for up to 5,000+ in the event of a news event like 9/11.
I'm planning to use SuSE 9 with squid transparently. I think I can handle setting up squid and the other little packages that we intend to mix in with it (already tested on a smaller scale),
Unless you have major reasons to go for Suse you may wish to consider a more minimal distro. If you're happy with turning off/disabling stuff you don't need (including a GUI!) then fine but Suse will likely install loads of stuff you don't need which can possibly end up using CPU/RAM and hence slow your system down. With that type of max-load you want to keep it as lean as possible.
but I'm not sure about sizing the partitions. Is one file system better than another for caching? >How many partitions? How big?
Should I
mirror the drives? I need the best performance with just a dash of
fault
tolerance. :) The config of the box will be backed up frequently in
case it
needs to be rebuilt. I'm thinking a partition scheme like this
/boot 100MB reiser
/ 10 GB reiser
/var/log 20 GB reiser
/var/cache 30 GB aufs (or reiser? this is the cache_dir)
Hmm, maybe RAID the OS drive but you should consider having multiple cache_dir's one for each drive you can have as a single drive. I think I'm right in saying that having a cache_dir per drive will give a better increase in performance compared with mirror RAIDing a cache_dir
Are there any squid configuration parms that I should be aware for a deployment of this size? Any "gotchas" to look out for? Any on-going administrative bummers? Cool tools for administration? I'd like to run the package that comes with SuSE and can be updated with the provided tools, but I can compile and install from source if necessary. Any arguments in favor of one over the other?
Bear in mind Squid won't benefit from multiple CPU's, though you can bind apps to specific CPU's and maybe give Squid it's own CPU and let everything else run on the other one?
hth
Regards,
nry
_________________________________________________________________
It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today! http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger
