Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:58:02 -0500 (CDT) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> To: Patrick Gardella <patrick@cre8tivegroup.com> Cc: simonr@roland.co.uk, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: FreeBSD as a web server Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980811102313.11971A-100000@duey.hs.wolves.k12.mo.us> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.980811090625.patrick@cre8tivegroup.com>
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On Tue, 11 Aug 1998, Patrick Gardella wrote: > > On 11-Aug-98 simonr@roland.co.uk wrote: > > I was recently recommended to run an apache web server on BSD UNIX so that > > we could host our own web site. I want to know if FreeBSD is BSD or if it is > > a cut down version of a BSD version that is for sale. If it is, would it be > > suitable to base a web server such as apache on? We currently get hits on > > our site approximately every two-three minutes. We would be running it on a > > dual pentium II 333 MHz with 256-512 Mb ram and a RAID controller > > controlling3-4 hard drives. > > FreeBSD is an independant continuation of the BSD project. As the name > suggests, it is *free*. You may download it from http://www.freebsd.org > Information is availible on that site that explains the history of FreeBSD, and > how to set it up. > > If you would prefer, you can purchase FreeBSD on CD-ROM. See > http://www.cdrom.com/titles/os/freebsd.htm > > It is very much suited as a web server. Yahoo is a FreeBSD site, as well as > Pair.com (largest independent web hosting service). Apache runs quite well. > Furthermore, many add-ons availible to Apache will work on FreeBSD. > > That machine you will be putting it on will require FreeBSD-current to use the > dual processors (SMP). It is the cutting-edge development system. It will be > released as FreeBSD 3.0 on or about October 15th. Overall, with hits every 2-3 > minutes, this machine is overkill. A machine of that size could host many > sites. The critical matter is the connection speed to the net. Unless you are > serving huge amounts of information, a old Pentium-200 with about 128 Megs > RAM would handle it nicely. One of our sites is hosted on a Pentium II 266 Mhz > (512Kb cache), 128Mb RAM, 5.8Gb total disk. It handles 250 sites, and the load > is only: > 9:05AM up 189 days, 22 hrs, 12 users, load averages: 0.05, 0.17, 0.15 > Jeez, people... A 386SX-33Mhz with 8MB RAM could easily handle a few "hits every two-three minutes" and more. (*cough*, No, I don't have a machine like that sitting in the corner of a computer lab doing HTTP/DHCP/DNS/SMB-print-serving for the whole lab or anything...) You're about to try and kill an amoeba with Big Bertha. A 486-66 w/ 48MB RAM and a single 2GB SCSI drive handles all of our WWW (CGI too), Squid HTTP cache (200MB), FTP, SMTP (at least several thousand pieces of mail per day), POP3, and DNS traffic, along with me reading mail on it using Pine. The system load when I'm not logged in and doing my stuff rarely ever breaks 0.15, and about the only thing using swap is Squid (25MB) for quick object retrieval. The load/uptime right _now_, with me typing this stuff in is: cdillon@duey [/home/cdillon]> uptime 10:50AM up 32 days, 22:37, 3 users, load averages: 0.04, 0.06, 0.06 'top' says: 45 processes: 1 running, 44 sleeping CPU states: 4.2% user, 0.0% nice, 0.8% system, 1.1% interrupt, 93.9% idle Mem: 21M Active, 5568K Inact, 11M Wired, 6812K Cache, 5589K Buf, 1588K Free Swap: 100M Total, 26M Used, 74M Free, 26% Inuse The reason you can perform so well with so little hardware is because FreeBSD is certainly _not_ a resource hog and does an excellent job managing memory and CPU time. I'm not saying you should go out and find some ancient machine to run your stuff, nor am I saying I wouldn't love to have some heavier servers. :-) But maybe you could put that hefty hardware elsewhere if it really is only going to get a few hits every few minutes. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net /* FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For Intel x86 and compatibles (SPARC and Alpha under development) (http://www.freebsd.org) */ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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