Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 16:49:12 +0100 From: Andreas Klemm <andreas@klemm.gtn.com> To: Lukas Wunner <lukas@design.de> Cc: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Luis_E=2E_Mu=F1oz=22?= <lem@cantv.net>, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [fbsd-isp] Designing for a very large ISP Message-ID: <19980104164912.63008@klemm.gtn.com> In-Reply-To: <19980104141146.32430@reactor>; from Lukas Wunner on Sun, Jan 04, 1998 at 02:11:46PM %2B0100 References: <3.0.5.32.19980103121611.007af8f0@pop.cantv.net> <19980104141146.32430@reactor>
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On Sun, Jan 04, 1998 at 02:11:46PM +0100, Lukas Wunner wrote: > Hi, > > > During the first year, it'll have to support some 100000 users. > > Of course, we've already chosen FreeBSD as the core OS for this > > after looking to Digital Unix, Solaris and Windows NT. > > My suggestion would be to look at an SGI Origin 200/2000 or Sun U2 box > instead of a PC box running FreeBSD. We have experienced severe problems > with PCs wrt expandability/scalability. E.g., we currently have 256MB of > RAM in our news box but would love to go to 512MB, but the motherboard > is not capable of doing that although the documentation and the webpages > state the contrary (it's a Tyan Tomcat III or IV). If you want to go to > something like 1GB or 2GB of RAM, you're stuck with a PC. The only > solution seem to be PPro based machines, but the chipsets available so > far are really ugly wrt memory and PCI performance in my opinion (as > compared to good old Pentium based boards). The only chipset which seems > to be able to support lots of RAM and more than 4 PCI cards seems to be > the Orion GX, one implementation being the AMI Goliath board (cf. www.ami.com). The question is, if the PCI bus performance of PPro and PII boards is really so worse as you tell. Look at companies, that drive huge freebsd Servers (cdrom.com, Yahoo, ...). Login on ftp.freebsd.org as anonymous ftp user and watch the login message: 230-Welcome to wcarchive - home ftp site for Walnut Creek CDROM. 230-There are currently 1603 users out of 2750 possible. ... 230-This machine is a P6/233 with 1GB of memory & 142GB of disk online. 230-The operating system is FreeBSD... What counts is reliability, service and to get the "best bang for the buck". I think for an ISP it's crucially important to have fast connectivity and fast routers. So I personally would spend more money in the network infrastructure (buy fast ciscos and invest in good lines), then to spend too much money in high end machines, if FreeBSD Server as a nice rack mounted system perform excellent. I personally don't believe, that buying Suns or SGI's bring you a better server if you compare price/performance... Please read the FreeBSD Newsletter, where one of the Yahoo founders describe, why they choosed FreeBSD as their overall Web Server platform. As a really good example .... > Note: this is no FreeBSD-bashing. I'd always prefer a FreeBSD-based > machine to an SGI Origin 2000 if it wasn't that difficult to find > PC hardware which suits our needs wrt scalability/performance. > Any recommendations for high-end PC hardware are welcome. People are working on a FreeBSD Ultra Sparc port ;-) Maybe this might attract you in the future ... But I'd really recommend, that you get a test system with a PPro 233 MHz, 1 GB RAM, one or more 3940, one or more Seagate Barracudas and create for the news partition a stripe set using ccd ... It should perform nicely ;-) And then compare price and performance and then we speak again about scalability and price ;-)) Andreas /// -- Andreas Klemm powered by ,,symmetric multiprocessor FreeBSD''
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