What server specs would you suggest for Free Hosted Movie galleries?

you hate me

No I have love for every one


Xeon 2gig ram should be juicy?Or go will Dual P4's?

Need to be more specific.

We have some programs running on one box, and we have some running on multiple load balanced machines.

How big do you plan on going.

I think if you're talking Sponsor type big, I'd recommend going with clustering of small servers. I don't like the idea of spending all your money on an uber $10k machine and have it rendered useless because the nic card died.

1U servers
Single proc should be fine (2MGhz procs pentium)
Gig of ram
SCSI hard drive ( whatever you can afford ) OR NFS mount a SUPER HUGE disk server that you load all our images/content onto.


Trade off is that you have a single point of failure if that machine goes down. But the nice thing is that you don't have Gigs and gigs of the same content spread across all of your servers. Also, if you decide to add a new machine to the cluster, you don't need to copy over all that content. Either would be fine, just what you feel more comfortable with.


The server is just gonna be dishing out images and movies. Just needs good hard drives i would say


I would say three of those would run you about 2500 each... and to start, 3 servers.

i'm gonna shoot in the dark and say a throughput should be around 1mill page views if you're dishing out movies. probably more if you're just dishing out pics.

my I'm not really a hardware guy. I'm more of a software guy.

Oh... and you'd probably want a load balancer that can dish out requests based on bandwidth usage. Not necessarily the one with the least amount of requests. That would be if you're mixing movies with pic content. If you're just only one or the other... then you could just round robin DNS it.

pics?... and webair!

Serving movies is I/O intensive, so I would focus less on raw CPU/memory and place emphasis on the # of spindles (disks) and I/O channels. To expand on this, I would use a 0+1 Raid configuration (mirror + stripe). Furthermore, I would recommend using a webserver such as Zeus which uses a multiple process, single thread model unlike Apache 1.x.

There are many ways to approach this depending on your availability requirements and budget.

I'd get something like a dual xeon 2.8 ghz, with 2 GB of ram (should be expandable to at least 4Gb down the road.. ) then slap a few 10k or 15k rpm scsi drives in there in a raid.

Another nice thing would be to have a gigabit ethernet card in the machine as well. ;)