From owner-freebsd-questions Wed May 12 14:17:31 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pokey.local.net (tcs5-07.netwalk.net [206.175.76.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6815415304 for ; Wed, 12 May 1999 14:16:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jmutter@netwalk.com) Received: from insomnia.local.net (insomnia.local.net [192.168.2.3]) by pokey.local.net (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id RAA18242; Wed, 12 May 1999 17:10:11 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from jmutter@insomnia.local.net) Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 17:13:24 -0400 (EDT) From: "James A. Mutter" Reply-To: jmutter@netwalk.com To: Alfred Perlstein Cc: "James A. Mutter" , GVB , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: We are a growing ISP, need some advice! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :> At 08:51 AM 5/12/99 -0700, GVB wrote: [snip] :> 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? :) No, and I resent the implication. :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. Alfred, do you work for Microsoft now? :) I think a dual 400/500 as a mail server is a bit extreme, don't you? Even as a web server, you should be more concerned with I/O here (and I don't think dropping a P4000DX66 is going to help) than processing power. He said he's using SSL, I doubt it's _all_ SSL _all the time_. Is it reasonable to believe that every page from every site is being encrypted? More than likely that's _not_ the case. It's far more likely, as a matter of fact, that SSL pages make up a very small percentage of the total hits. I think it's fair to make the same statement about the FrontPage pages. Out of 800 VHosts, I can't believe that _all of them_ are using SSI's. :You definetly need more ram. You should consider striping disks :for more performance. You're right there, striping disks is a good thing. In this particular case it could give him the extra throughput that he needs. :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