Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 15:26:24 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@rush.net> To: "James A. Mutter" <jm7996@devrycols.edu> Cc: GVB <gvbmail@tns.net>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: We are a growing ISP, need some advice! Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990512151251.26546L-100000@cygnus.rush.net> In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990512133120.007d72a0@devrycols.edu>
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On Wed, 12 May 1999, James A. Mutter wrote: > At 08:51 AM 5/12/99 -0700, GVB wrote: > >Hi there. I am a systems administrator for a small ISP in San Diego that is > >rapidly growing. We offer basically all ISP services including dialup, > >domain hosting, dedicated connections, etc. All of our servers are run off > >of FreeBSD. > > That's a good thing. :) > > > >Mail server is a PentiumII 233 with 384 megs of RAM running UW SCSI hard > >drives. It is currently 2.2.8 with sendmail and Qpopper. > >Our web server is a PentiumII 266 with 384 megs of RAM running UW SCSI hard > >drives. It is currently 3.1 running Apache-ssl with Frontpage extensions. > > Seems like that could be overkill for a web server, unless you're relying > heavily on server side includes or doing moderate to serious database work. um, ssl == encryption == CPU suckage, frontpage == MS application == CPU suckage.... > >We have about 150 virtual domains running on the web server and about 800 > >dialin accounts + the mail from all the virtual domains running off of that > >one mail server. We are starting to see a definite need for a bigger > >server farm. My question is, what should my growth point be from here, how > >do I scale this thing to accomidate all the users and domains I am hosting, > >because we are noticing the hardware starting to slow, the mail server > >actually hits swap space, even with 384 megs of RAM in it. > > Why is this a problem? It's perfectly normal for FreeBSD to use swap, even > when the machine is under a light load. I've seen mail servers with a load > average > 10 using more swap than you have RAM and they're just fine. > Remember, it's a only a mail server. I don't think that speed is something > to be terribly concerned about. speed is always important. mail + swap is ok (sometimes) web + swap is bad, it quickly leads to a cascading problem where the box goes to hell. generally seeing no swappage is best, and perhaps some at peak load, when you're taking care of customers swap is your indication that you've waited _too long_ for an upgrade. > >I have read up on doing round robin DNS with the Web Servers, but never > >really understood how the disks are synched up, does it run on NFS with one > >machine serving the content? > > > >How about scaling the mail servers? Where can I read up on setting up > >multiple mail/pop3 servers? What is the best solution to do this. > > Why? Again, your machines are doing just fine. Save your money for > additional phone lines/bandwidth/advertising/etc... You really don't need > a HW upgrade at this point. James, did you work for AOL a few years back? :) I don't think he really needs to cluster yet, getting a 3.1-stable box up and running with dual PII or Xeon and about 512 or 1 gig or ram would probably be much better. Think about it, you have a 233mhz system, by going dual 400/500mhz processor you get about an 4x factor added to your capacity. You definetly need more ram. You should consider striping disks for more performance. The idea of NFS clustering the web servers isn't a bad one, you may want to investigate it. You'll have to tune the NFS caching code though, FreeBSD supports gigabit ethernet now, so putting your NFS server on a gig-port on a switch that supports it and your other boxes behind it my help. -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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