Hi Greg:

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008, Gregory Favre wrote:
> Our failover server is entering its post-warranty period (wish him a
> pleasant retirement).

Pleasant retirement!

> Therefore we are planning on buying a brand new server and make the
> current one become our failover machine. Has any of you some advices
> about the best hardware for invenio?
>
> - quantity of RAM (8 or 16GB?)

8 GB should be comfortably enough, even though more RAM won't hurt.

> - dual or quad processor(s)?

Dual Core 2 Duo should be enough (giving effective 4 processing units),
but then again Quad won't hurt.

> - Speed of disks

Personally I like SAS (post-SCSI) disks 10-15K RPM.  Would be good to
separate DB disks and Apache/file disks, so it is better to get more
smaller-sized ones than one big-sized one.

(Similarly, if performance is an issue, then I think it would be
advantageous to think ahead in the direction of getting two boxes one
day, one dedicated to Apache and another to MySQL.  So you may want to
buy a smaller box now followed by another smaller box later instead of a
big box now.  If the usage goes even higher, then you can add another
small box as a web server for robots where the robots would be directed
by a load balancer...)

E.g. we are using "somewhat aging" HP DL380G5 boxes with usually Dual
Core 2 Duo 2.3 GHz CPU and 8 GB RAM and SAS 72 GB or 148 GB 10K RPM HDD
in RAID-1 configuration using the built-in HP Smart Array HW RAID.

> ~700K pages (~10M hits) per month(robots included)

So something like ~20 pages and ~220 hits per minute on average?  What
are the numbers for the "busiest ever" minute during the day?  What
about your OS load average at that time?

Best regards
-- 
Tibor Simko ** CERN Document Server ** <http://cds.cern.ch/>

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