On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 05:25:26AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
This requests goes out _especially_ to the 'hands
dirty' developers
who are intricately familiar with where our hardware bottlenecks are
most likely to be. But anyone with solid, non-speculative ideas is
welcome to comment!
As Jason said, he bought another gig of ram -- we are planning to
basically max out the machines if that will help. That hard drive
that didn't work, well, we'll get the right one soon, and that'll help
significantly I think. Also, if I'm not mistaken, one of these
machines has a dual processor board, but only a single processor, is
that right, Jason? So that's an easy upgrade, once we find and buy
the right part.
But, imagine this: suppose I were shopping at
http://www.penguincomputing.com/, as I always do, and I wanted to
spend around $3000 on new hardware for wikipedia. Presumably, this
could either be one new kickass machine, or 2 new very nice frontend
webservers, or whatever else we think we could best use.
Given that budget, what should I buy that's most likely to give us the
best bang for the buck?
And then, of course, once we have settled on the general type of
hardware (i.e. 2 medium machines or 1 kickass machine) that will be
most useful to us, we could also extend our shopping to other
suppliers. I have used penguincomputing many times and I've been very
happy, but I'd go elsewhere if there was good reason.
--Jimbo
Other than maxing the RAM in pliny, and adding a second processor to
larousse, I don't think spending $3000 on hardware is a wise investment
at this point. The hardware than it can buy would not help to provide a
significant enough speed improvement for the cost.
However, if you are dead set on spending your money, this is how I see
the greatest benefit:
Get a cheapish 1U dual CPU Athlon/Xeon system. It doesn't need to have
a lot of memory or speedy disks. It does need reasonable processors,
since it will be crunching on PHP all day. Make this our front end web
server, and move the web serving off of both pliny and larousse. Don't
bother upgrading larousse - instead, make this our mail server / backup
server. Upgrade pliny (if possible) to 4GB of memory and some faster
RAIDed hard disks. If within budget, you might want to upgrade pliny
past the Athlon MP 1800s (I think), which is what it has now. (provided
this is possible in our servers)
Any counter-opinions out there?
Estimates:
4x 1GB PC2100 for pliny: $800
2x Athlon MP 2.08 (2800) Barton for pliny: $500
2x ?GB 10k RPM SCSI disks: ?
Dual rackmount 1U web server: ?
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN