Date: Sat, 11 Nov 1995 11:03:59 -0500 (EST) From: Brian Tao <taob@io.org> To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Cc: hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Anyone else think it's about time to beat a WEB server to death? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.951111104259.194c-100000@flinch.io.org> In-Reply-To: <199511102124.VAA13009@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
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On Fri, 10 Nov 1995, Michael Smith wrote:
>
> Brian Tao's benchmarks (700K+ hits per day) are a good opener when
> talking to commercial vendors that think that 10K/hour is "heavy".
That was under ideal conditions... no network lag, all local
disks, no CGI's or authentication, etc. If you throw in lagged and
randomly dropped connections, NFS-mounted Web pages and moderate CGI
loading (page counters, e-mail forms, finger gateways, etc.), the peak
rate falls to around 400K requests per day, peak. On an average day,
this works out to around 200K hits (assuming 4x difference between
service valleys and peaks).
This tests were done on a 486DX4/100 with 16 megabytes of RAM,
1-gig Quantum local disk, an SGI PowerChallenge as the NFS server,
over 10-baseT Ethernet to a cheap ISA D-Link NIC. Total cost is less
than $2000 these days (not including the SGI ;-)). This figure should
be of interest to commercial Web space vendors, because a moderately
busy site charging the going rate for server rental and bandwidth fees
can generate enough revenue to add another node at least once a month.
IMHO, CGI processing is the biggest factor in determining what
sort of hardware you need to run your server. The OpenText server
(http://www.opentext.com/) sits in a machine room three floors above
my office. They provide Yahoo with the hardware and software used in
their database searches. There are three DEC Alpha servers upstairs
with 5 CPU's and 5 gigabytes of RAM in all. A fast Pentium server
could easily handle the HTTP front-end and shuffle the CGI queries off
to the Alphas which do 99% of the work.
I'd like to do some more benchmarking with FreeBSD on different
hardware, but I haven't had the time yet. Internex Online was just
bought by a media communications company with lots of money, so maybe
that means I can hire some assistants to do grunt work while I play
around with cool stuff. :)
--
Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org)
Systems Administrator, Internex Online Inc.
"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"
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