Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2003 15:17:52 -0400 (EDT) From: Support <support@netmint.com> To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: load testing and tuning a 4GB RAM server Message-ID: <20030406145845.R18790-100000@netmint.com> In-Reply-To: <3E906828.8060001@mac.com>
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[..clip..] > However, possibly with a degree of self-contradictory advice :-), I'd > set maxusers to a specific value like 256 or so. I will set it to 384 that the system already auto-defaults it to, unless someone can suggest why I should leave it at 0. Perhaps you guys should make it very clear in the manuals or LINT that autotuning only happens at boot time because there possibly is a perception that it auto-tunes on a running system. Even after I read all threads regarding this that I can find, I am still not sure what sysctl vars will be able to auto-tune at RUNTIME while the load creeps up. I am sure the important ones like nmbclusters and n/mbuf variables can't. So which can? > Also, increase NSWAPDEV to at least two, so you at least have a > possibility of adding more swap to a running system or for adding some > in order to take down the primary swap area for some reason. I probably will never need to increase swap without rebooting because there is no available disk space to do it. Is there a reason to make it 2 at the expense of losing KVA memory if you know that adding swap will entail a reboot (i.e. you can recompile kernel first)? > How many simultaneous users do you expect? WWW hits per day, or At the lower end 1500 to 2000 and possibly as high as 4000 established web connections at peak times at any given moment. And as little as 500 at off-peak times. The web traffic will split 25-30% dynamic PHP/Perl (75% of which will require DB interaction) and 70-75% pure file downloads. This will amount to millions of connections per day, so I think looking at it from the constant load point of view allowing for X many connections established is a better idea. > pageviews (if you can distinguish)? Are you going to be using SSL, lots > of virtual domains, any special apache modules? Logfile analysis needs? Yes to SSL (openssl, mod_ssl), yes to SSL virtual domains with their own IPs, yes to normal virtual domains with with their own IPs. I am thinking of running Apache modules for Perl and PHP but the problem is I can't maintain security and wrap the executed code with modules. Wrapcgi allows me to do that. I heard Apache 2 modules can be assigned user/group permissions which will essentiall make wrapcgi unnecessary, but I just don't know yet. Any advice with that? > Also, what are you doing with the database; that is to say, which DB MySQL for 90-95% and PostgreSQL for 5-10% of usage. The reason for going with 1 server instead of 2 is to create chunks of users per server and allow them to use unix sockets. As soon as load is too high, we just get another web/db server. Not sure what kind of usage the databases will see, most likely 80-85% reads and 15-20% writes. [...clip...] > up user files. That's aside from the fact that you really don't want to > keep database files on RAID-5 storage in the first place, either-- keep > the DB on RAID-1 or RAID-1,0 if you can: use some of that 15K swapspace > if you need to. Chuck, I understand what you're saying. Unfortunately, the decision to go with RAID 5 is financial. Is there concrete evidence that RAID 5 is absolutely terible for read/write access? It's been holding up pretty well in tests. Thanks, and please cc: me on replies. Andrew
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