Date: Sun, 19 Oct 97 18:08:27 -0700 From: "Studded" <Studded@dal.net> To: "freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG>, "Nguyen Phi Khanh" <nguyenpk@kuci.org> Cc: "freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: To support 2k users.. Message-ID: <199710200108.SAA12397@mail.san.rr.com>
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On Sun, 19 Oct 1997 15:18:28 -0700 (PDT), Nguyen Phi Khanh wrote: > I'm planning on supporting 2000 users and I'm wondering if anyone >has any good ideas on what I should do. Someone already mentioned that the key factor is what these users will be doing. :) Another key is how many of them you expect to be logged on concurrently. If you're just supporting shell logins, you can get by with less hardware.. if your users are going to be doing a lot of development, you need more. > I plan on either buying multiple >boxes of Dual Pentium Pro machines to support a fraction of the 2k users >on FreeBSD or BSD/OS, *or* buy one or two Sun Sparc Ultras. I'm curious as to why dual cpu setups as opposed to singles? And in general I would say that more smaller machines will give you more flexibility. > I'm not too sure how well FreeBSD or BSD/OS does SMP either. This was answered already, but don't count on FreeBSD SMP for any production work. > Anyone supporting 2k >users willing to give me any advice on how I should approach this? I'm >curious as to how many shell users can one Dual PPro 200 box running FBSD >handle. Any suggestions or ideas or speculations would be welcomed. :) The IRC server I help run peaked at 4k+ users (see my .sig :) running on a PII 266 with 128 megs of ram. This was due in large part to the limitations of our ircd (which we are rectifying :), although I suspect that we will be hitting some limits in the OS when we hit 5k or so. Back in the "old days" we ran with 2k users very comfortably on a Ppro 200 with the same ram. An IRC server uses almost no disk i/o, and runs completely in ram. It is highly cpu intensive both for all of the tcp traffic, and processing resynch bursts when another server joins the network after a split. I recommend the following changes to support large numbers of users, based on experience and the kind assistance of one of the core team members (who shall remain nameless unless he wants to wave at y'all :). If you need explanation of any of these, let me know (but try the man pages and mail archives first :). In /etc/make.conf: CFLAGS= -O -pipe COPTFLAGS= -O -pipe In the kernel config file: cpu "I686_CPU" That's the only one you need for a Ppro or PII system. maxusers 512 This may seem high, but our systems that run 1,500 to 2k users bog down if they don't set it this high. My system has maxusers set to 640. options "NMBCLUSTERS=6000" 6k is a good number for servers of 1,500 users or so. You can use netstat -m to see how many mbuf clusters you are using during peak times, and adjust this number to 50% more than that. I've gone as high as 15k with no apparent ill effects. options "MAXMEM=131072" You will want to have more than 64M of ram for a power box. I hope this provides some useful info for you. :) Doug *** Proud operator, designer and maintainer of the world's largest *** Internet Relay Chat server. 4,168 clients and still growing. :-) *** Try spider.dal.net on ports 6662-4 (Powered by FreeBSD)
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