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Re: server configuration strategies



On Saturday 26 May 2001 23:15, Doug Alcorn wrote:
> Are there any strategy guides that talk about how/when to split up
> services on differnet servers?  Are different platforms better at

Split things up when they get slow.  There is no good guide to when they will 
get slow because each system is different and has different load patterns.

> different tasks (like network I/O, disk I/O, cpu)?  For instance,

Machines with Intel CPUs will beat almost anything for integer math, will 
perform OK for floating point math (which is fine as you hardly ever need it 
for an ISP), and will perform quite well for network and disk IO.

If you do some benchmarks expect the latest Intel/AMD-based machines to 
outperform your Sun and your Mac on every test.

IO is one area that PCs can really stand out.  Software RAID on Linux with 
ATA-100 hard drives can easily outperform Sun hardware RAID arrays costing 
100 times more money.

Another issue is that of reliability.  If something dies and you go off-line 
then you lose money!

Use RAID for all hard drives.  Wherever possible have several almost 
identical machines so that you can swap parts when things go wrong.  Having a 
Sun and an Apple is a bad idea IMHO.  If one of them breaks you can't easily 
get replacement parts.  With PCs you can have three identical PCs so if the 
most important machine dies you can swap parts with less important machines.

-- 
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