On Tue, 9 May 2000, Leslie Mikesell wrote:
> > We use a custom written session handler that uses Storable for
> > serialization. We're storing complete results for complex select
> > statements on pages that require "paging" so that the complex select only
> > happens once. We store user objects complete, and many multi-level complex
> > data structures at whim.
>
> What kind of traffic can you support with this?
Great than 1 million page views per day, and growing fast. Response is
instantaneous, and the machines are lightly utilized, except during peak
time (which for us is around 4 a.m. PST) where they get moderately
utilized.
We have a classic split-architecture proxy/mod_perl/database system,
except that we also utilize load balancing to split incoming requests to 4
proxy boxes. Their requests get load balanced to 2 backend mod_perl
machines, and their requests go to a single Oracle machine.
The Oracle machine is, at most, 25% capacity. And, hardware wise, we can
scale it up considerably.
> > Limiting yourself to cookie size limitation would be a real drag.
>
> I'm more concerned about dealing with large numbers of simultaneous
> clients (say 20,000 who all hit at 10 AM) and I've run into problems
> with both dbm and mysql where at a certain point of write activity
> you basically can't keep up. These problems may be solvable but
> timings just below the problem threshold don't give you much warning
> about what is going to happen when your locks begin to overlap.
That's why we use Oracle, and spend a lot of time tweaking and tuning the
disk farm. Oracle is King in high volume situations, from what I've heard,
and I must admit that I've rarely been as impressed (in 22 years of
computer history) with it's performance and stability, though I have no
experience with anything else under similar loads.
Let me ask you a question: Are you really going to be able to handle
20,000 simultaneous users within a minute (perhaps 60,000 to 80,000
apache requests if only a single page view per user)?
--
-- Tom Mornini
-- InfoMania Printing and Prepress
