Is this server powerful enough for hosting TGPs?
 

I have a 1x Intel Dual Core Xeon 3050 with 4GB DDR2 server that I'm using to load the thumbs for several TGPs. TGP traffic is about 120k a day and bandwidth is usually 22-25Mbps. At peak traffic times the thumbs can take 3 or 4 seconds before they start loading or they just load in slow.

Can anyone tell me if the server is not powerful enough for the job? Or maybe it just needs some tweaking to get better performance for loading small files.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks :)

It will work fine,but you will need to optimize it.

This is PLENTY powerful for this task. If you have any specific questions on tuning/setup, please feel free to ICQ me. :)

EDIT: For small files, I recommend using ReiserFS and a raid scheme to improve total IOPS of diskperformance. You could also consider mounting the memory as a ramdisk, depending on the total amount of thumbs being served. Lots of good tweaking options here!

Wow quick reply thanks :thumbsup

Can you point me towards any forums/sites that I can read that will give me some tips?

First of all, what OS are you running on the server?

I can give you tips over icq if you want.In exchange you can force some traffic from your sites(we already trade but i could use some more trades and traffic)

Try using nginx instead of apache.. and cache your thumbs in memory instead of serving them from disk

Near the top of your Apace config file you'll find about 40 LoadModule directives.
Those load up various modules so you can do all kinds of nifty things with Apache.
mod_speling, for example, automatically fixed typos in URLs. Most of those modules
are things you'll never use in your life, and all of them make the server slower.
If this server is serving only thumbs, not running the PHP, probably 38 of those
40 modules can be commented out and the server will be MUCH faster - up to the
point where your network connection is the bottleneck. The top 2 to comment out
if you aren't using them are mod_php and mod_perl. Both are big, powerful modules
and by being big they slow things down.

There are several other configuration directives to tweak too.

The initial idea for nginx looked promising, but I'm not at all impressed with it.
The idea was to make a very small, fast web server, making it fast by leaving
out 96% of the features that a Apache has. Well, people wanted more features,
of course, so they were added, and now nginx doesn't perform any better
than Apache does if you simply don't load unneeded modules. nginx and a bare
Apache are extremely similar, but with Apache when you need to add a feature
later you simply uncomment the relevant module. With nginx, the feature simply
isn't available, period.

depends how much traffic you're going to get

i disagree i know many people that have gone from a striped down apache to nginx for static content apache will never in a million years match nginx for static content.

This is assuming you know how to setup nginx properly.

ditto, for static nginx will stomp apache.

Thats a piece of cake for a server like that. Sounds like you have a config problem.