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.
First a disclaimer, as nobody has done any serious measurement,
what we can do is no more than an educated guess.
It seems that adding much more RAM (the fastest kind of RAM you can find)
to all machines would help most. So that all the databases fit in RAM,
and there's plenty space left for tcp/ip connection buffers,
per-process PHP memory etc.
Current database design is very centralized, so single kickass machine
would probably help more.