On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Rob Bloodgood wrote:
> > RB> Alright, then to you and the mod_perl community in general, since
> > RB> I never saw a worthwhile resolution to the thread "the edge of
> > RB> chaos,"
(Warning, sweeping generalizations for the sake of illustration below.)
Hi Rob.
Here's how you design an e-commerce site:
Figure out how many users you want to service.
Figure out how much juice it takes to service each user.
Multiply.
Add 50%.
Build.
You simply cannot come forward and say, "look, I've got this big-assed
linux box, why is my site sucking?" We don't know, and it's neither our
job nor our business to know. I saw many very, very good explanations on
the 'edge of chaos' thread, a couple of which actually led me to make some
tweaks on my own site. I'll try to recap it:
You should never be anywhere near any fine line - the risk is just too
great. Swap kills web sites. Queueing kills web sites. People looking for
'graceful degradation' in a production web architecture are looking for
the wrong answer. Unix is not designed to degrade gracefully - Linux even
less so. They are both designed to go balls-out as long as they have CPU
and RAM space to do so, and that's what they do.
The very, very best minds in production architecture out there will pine
over how much accessing data from RAM sucks - they want all cache, all the
time. There is not a linear falloff in performance from cache -> RAM ->
disk, and you should not expect one from the applications which rely on
those things.
The httpd.conf file is extremely well documented. There is a program in
$APACHE/bin called 'ab,' and will give you a decent baseline from which to
provision for your site, and etc.
If you have a specific problem, and ask a specific question, you will get,
usually, an outstanding answer, with as much technicial depth as you care
to probe for. If your question is "I'm really, really smart, why should I
have to learn all of this stuff," well, I don't think this is the list for
ya.
Hope that helps,
--
Blue Lang, Unix Voodoo Priest
202 Ashe Ave, Apt 3, Raleigh, NC. 919 835 1540
"I was born in a city of sharks and sailors!" - June of 44
