Greetings,
This is my first direct post to the list (my partner Tamra has been a list
participant for quite a while). Tamra and I are the two partners in a web
design and engineering studio currently called Hart Consulting (we're
thinking of changing our name) located in Silicon Valley, CA. Tamra
sometimes forwards postings from the list to me and I've been very
impressed with the depth and thoughtfulness of the postings.
Anyway, we're helping an entrepeneur develop a cost model for an Internet
business and one of his big questions is how much mileage he can reasonably
expect to get out of his web and database servers (before he has to start
load balancing the web servers and replicating the database servers). We're
leaning toward using dual-processor NT servers (initially one for the web
server and one for the SQL Server database) and Allaire Cold Fusion for
database connectivity and potentially for its built-in software load
balancing capability and Microsoft's IIS 4.0 web server software.
Does anyone have experience making this type of analysis or know of
existing resources on the web relevant to this type of analysis? I've
appended a rough analysis I did based on the assumption that his web server
machine could handle roughly 300,000 hits per day. I haven't done any
analysis on the database server machine yet.
One final thought is that in the back of his mind I think our client
believes that a pair of beefy Sun Enterprise servers along with an Oracle
database could handle a much greater load than than a pair of NT servers
with SQL Server as the database, but I don't know if this is consistent
with reality or is more the product of good marketing on the part of Sun
and Oracle.
Bruce Hart
Managing Partner
>I spoke with my contact (Deep ISP) tonight. He thinks that
>one of the dual-processor Pentium II machines ought to be able to easily
>handle several hundred thousand hits per day. Hits are a combination of html
>accesses and image downloads (a page with 9 images counts as 10 hits).
>Assuming an average of 9 images per page (the navigation graphics may make
>up the bulk of this image count), 300,000 hits per day becomes 30,000 page
>views per day. Assuming that each user hits 5 pages, 30,000 page views per
>day becomes 6,000 user sessions per day.
>
>
>6,000 user sessions per day works out to 42,000 user sessions per week. If
>the typical user does 3 sessions per week, that means that roughly 14,000
>different users can hit the site during a given week. Assuming that only 25%
>of your registered users actually hit the site during a given week, that
>means that one web server could support roughly 56,000 registered users.
>
>
>This kind of math is very rough (even assuming I didn't make a mistake at
>this late hour) and doesn't take into account peak load situations which
>might bring the web server to its knees temporarily even though the
>daily/weekly load is within the web server's capabilities. Also, this
>calculation doesn't consider the possibility that the database server might
>be the bottleneck or take into account the load that running the ColdFusion
>scripts will place on the web server machine (thus I suppose that this
>should be considered best-case thinking).
------------------------------------------------------------
Hart Consulting http://www.hartcons.com/
Web Design & Engineering Studio Silicon Valley, California
650-967-6162 1-800-749-8032 (fax)
------------------------------------------------------------
____________________________________________________________________
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Join The NEW Web Consultants Association FORUMS and CHAT:
Register Today at: http://just4u.com/forums/
Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants
Give the Gift of Life This Year...
Just4U Stop Smoking Support forum - helping smokers for
over three years-tell a friend: http://just4u.com/forums/
To get 500 Banner Ads for FREE
go to http://www.linkbuddies.com/start.go?id=111261
---------------------------------------------------------------------
