Your server specs.
 

What are your server specs? (computer specs, hits/day stats, clickthrus/day, scripted or not, etc.) I need a server upgrade and I'm just curious to how badly I need it.

My specs:
- 400MHz, 512MB RAM,
- 50,000 hits/day (100,000 clickthrus/day estimated).
- running perl/dbi/mysql scripts

As you can see, my CPU needs a boost and my CPU idle is running low.

(And no, this isn't an attempt for a DVD player; give me some help.)

100,000 click thrus out of 50,000 hits...

not bad :thumbsup

i'm running a 1.3 ghz for my sites. it got 512 ram and can do well over 100'000 hits per day i believe

if you need more CPU to handle that, i'd say your code needs some work.

50,000 hits per day is less than 1 per second, so your scripts would have to take, on average, longer than a second to run - that's an eternity, really.

there might be ways you can improve performance by tuning Apache, too. if you're hitting swap AT ALL, you need to concentrate on solving that issue before anything else.

Depends on whether you're forking processes when your script runs or not.

not hitting any swap, my processes hardly touch memory at all. mysql is just taking a lot more resources than i thought it would... that's why i'm wondering if it's just my code or if it typical for a 400MHz system to be too slow.

swap's an issue no matter what, but forking processes will indeed slow things down more, too. post your httpd.conf maybe some things could be tuned there. :)

400MHz isn't fast, and upgrading might help, but chances are you could improve performance by reducing complexities in the code, or caching more data. say you do a select query every second that adds up all the values related to a specific key - it might be worthwhile to have a cron job generate that every minute, store it in a separate table, and then you could add the values in the new table to only the most recent values from the old.

yeah, that's a wild "for instance", but it's just an idea. ;)

Mem: 517216K av, 499740K used, 17476K free, 653932K shrd, 182812K buff
Swap: 136512K av, 5852K used, 130660K free 112048K cached

512 is not enough?

basically it is just my new script that is chewing up all the resources, and this is how it works:

- every hit in and hit out is stored to a flat file in raw format.
- every 5 mins a cronjob runs a cgi that goes through all the raw data and queries mysql (my database) and modifies my html (my site). i do this so i don't have to access mysql every hit in and hit out. plus my site does not have to change every hit, every 5 minutes is often enough.

the only thing is that the hits out have to modify my hits owed and all that shit to determine who is owed the next hit and it also checks to make sure unique hits are sent out, etc. that is the problem (because i have so many clickthrus). my hit out exit script code is chewing up all my cpu.

dual 1.4ghz athlons (98% idle)
1024 mb of pc2100 ddr ram
15,000 rpm 2 meg cache 6 ns seek time SCSI drives
Tyan ThunderK7 motherboard

As rockford fosgate always says, heat is the #1 Killer ... so we put in 12 7200 rpm fans :-D

The thing sounds like a fucking 747 on take off :thumbsup

TaDoW, impressive, but how many hits/day and scripts do you run?

not a lot ... depends on the day .. on average, probably 100k hits per day. I have no idea how many scripts it runs ... that's my programmer's job :-)

1 x Dual PIII XEON 1 gig ram raid 5 4 x 15k discs (running 500-600 queries a second for http://freetgpsubmitter.com)

1 x P4 512 megs ram raid 1

1 x PIII 1k 512 megs ram no raid :) IDE!

1 x PIII 700 256 megs ram no raid IDE! werd ...

1 x PIII 700 1 gig ram plain scsi

All running perl/mysql/php

When you're talking about server performance, having more RAM is more important than a faster processor (CPU)

of course, you should upgrade the CPU as well, but if you can only afford to do one thing, its always good to add more memory

Look at my stats above. Do you think that I need more RAM? (This not meant to be sarcastic; please answer!)

Thanks. Does a script run on every click on one of your sites for example? Does your site have a traffic trading script at all?

rewrite this all in php/mysql and you'll save yourself huge amounts of resources.

500-600 mysql queries / second? Holy shit. Can you explain in more detail what you are doing?

Are you saying php is faster that perl?

Rewrite this all in php/mysql and you'll save yourself huge amounts of resources. You'll want to make sure that PHP is running as a server module.

Having mysql/php handle large amounts of requests is basically what they do best, if your code is done right,there is a reason all highend websites are database driven ;)

Joe

PHP is way faster than Perl, even if you have FastCGI running and PHP is a module and isnt forked for each request.

Everytime a CGI is loaded your webserver opens a shell and executed perl -f(?) perlfile.cgi
where as php as a module is all embedded.


You will also need to optimize your database table fields so that your searching takes up a lot less time.

Joe

For simple front end webstuff YES, but server side calculations and text parsing NOWAY ...

The only database queries i do is a "does this searchstring exist in the database?" so if i got a hit from http://www.freegallery.biz/whatever.html, i would check to see if "freegallery.biz" existed in my mysql database. i can't really optimize that anymore. the searchstring field is defined as "UNIQUE index(searchstring)", so it's unique.

you might have a point on text parsing but i think overall php is a faster languge for web programming, even when it coming to creating sites you can get them done quicker with php.


Joe

Quad Pentium Xeons (forgot the Ghz)
12GB of RAM -- I think Rambus
2 36.7GB 15000 SCSI3 RAiD setup

Exactly my question. Is PHP really better than PERL for all the text parsing I have to do? This is a traffic trading script, not an HTML design script.

Humor me and rewrite all your perl scripts which are executed from apache to php and tell me how much of a drop off in load on your system there is ;0

Joe

The 500-600 queries a second is the max. the avg of my server is 300 queries a second.

Its a free tgp submitter. 4000 webmasters submitting gallery pages to 1200 TGP sites. 1 gallery page is posted to max 3 tgp sites. Every submission executes 20 queries on my db. Currently we're doing 1.5 million pages a month. You can have a look at it here http://www.freetgpsubmitter.com

B.

I've never programmed in PHP in my entire life... give me one hour and I'll post the results! :)

Looking at it now. That is unbelievable to me. 600 queries in a second... wow. I guess there are a lot of factors I don't know about, like the size of your databases and the complexity of your queries, but wow.

HQ, i can help you. Or with your perl code. Or to rewrite it into PHP for you. Let me know ... tomorrow, because i'm off to the coffin right now :sleep

Thanks for the offer. An ICQ msg is awaiting you. ttyl.

:pimp
WOW. I want one. NO! I want 5 of them!!! What would I do with them? I'd slap in some Sound cards, put some 6.1 speakers on them, and blast www.hamsterdance.com to the max! That's some serious power man, can I ask you SOME of the sites taht you have running on here? Do you by any chance own www.nasa.com ? :winkwink:

Until McAttack pointed it out, I missed your post! Awesome server!!!