Hi,
is I can step in here... ;-)
At 15:11 2/3/00 +0000, Tim Bunce wrote:
>> As a front-end we have 'cheap' PC's running Linux. The disks in the PC's
>> are only used for the OS and temporary storage of logs, etc.
>What level of web traffic are you handling 'from' the netapp?
>E.g., how much traffic to the netapp is there when your web site
>is getting peak traffic?
As we put the maximum of RAM in our Linux boxes, in most cases we don't
notice anything in the NetApp traffic when a site gets hit badly. For
example, we host one of the Dutch National newspapers (http://www.nrc.nl)
that way: because they come out with a daily edition around 4pm local time,
traffic varies from about 300 Kbit/sec during the day to about 2Mbit/sec
around the time the new update becomes available. However, we can't see
anything special in the NetApp traffic graph at that time: it is all being
served from the front-end server RAM. Since PC RAM is cheap, we can get a
lot of mileage out of our NetApp.
If we look at the total graph of NetApp traffic development of the past two
years, that graph has only risen about 25% from the original average
traffic. However, our web-traffic has quadrupled over that period, and the
number of front-end servers now about 20 instead of the original 3. And
the size of the NetApp has grown from 10 Gbyte to now about 45 Gbyte of
diskspace.
So I guess I would argue that maximum (relatively cheap) RAM in your
front-end servers is much more important than the maximum NetApp bandwidth...
Elizabeth Mattijsen
Tel: 020-6005700 Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 68-70
Fax: 020-6001825 1012 SE AMSTERDAM
Voor ernstige technische storingen zijn we buiten kantooruren
bereikbaar: 06-29500176 of zie onze website.
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