From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Mar 25 7:27:11 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from clmboh1-smtp3.columbus.rr.com (clmboh1-smtp3.columbus.rr.com [65.24.0.112]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0839D37B718 for ; Sun, 25 Mar 2001 07:27:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wmoran@iowna.com) Received: from iowna.com (dhcp065-024-023-038.columbus.rr.com [65.24.23.38]) by clmboh1-smtp3.columbus.rr.com (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id f2PFONH06559; Sun, 25 Mar 2001 10:24:24 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3ABE0E7D.8D2E46BD@iowna.com> Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 10:27:57 -0500 From: Bill Moran X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ali Niknam Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Alpha vs. Intel vs. Sun Sparc References: <001c01c0b528$953fce80$0100a8c0@cow> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >Hi Guys, >I'm in the process of buying a new server and I wanted to know which of these platforms are best for me? (Intel, Alpha or Sun system?) >The server will be a webserver running high-traffic sites with lots of CGI scripts.. That's a loaded question. I'm surprised you haven't got attacked with zealous replies. First off, you're asking on a FreeBSD list, which works primarily with Intel and some Alpha, so replies are going to be somewhat biased. You're also not going to get any really useful answers with how little information you provided. Are the CGI scripts pulling from a database? Are they math intensive? Do they produce a lot of disk access? What exactly do you mean by "high-traffic"? That's a pretty arbitrary statement. My personal experience: Modern Intelish hardware can handle just about anything you'd need. With FreeBSD, multiprocessors work well if your scripts are math-intensive, but aren't as effecient if you're doing a lot of memory access or disk access. My understanding is that Alpha is about top of the heap for floating point math, so if you're doing a lot of that you'll probably want to look at Alpha. (additional comments welcome) Suns are expensive. But where else are you going to get 64 processors in a single computer? If you really need that level of processing power, you'll probably want a Sun. (again ... additional comments welcome) Beyond that, there are many other options for optimizing a web server. If the CGI load is heavy, consider using a second server to serve out images and static pages. Most modern web sites are painfully heavy with graphics, so segregating these can take a considerable load off the CGI machine. This can be done with two seperate servers and good web page design, or by using a reverse proxy. I prefer the first method, but many people aren't skilled enough, or don't have enough control over the site to implement it. If you're using a database, consider putting the db server on a second server to allow the CGI scripts to use one processor while the db uses a second. If you've got heavy disk access, look into RAID and lots of RAM (I mean multiple gigs if you're REALLY busy) -Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message