> The short answer to the question about what would happen if 2.5 million
> users hit your PIII server at once. In a word: *poof*
Bad things happen, little gremlins come out of the wood work and data
starts to disappear.
> Check out:
>
> http://www.f5.com
> (f5 Load balancers are cool, Foundry also makes some good gear, I forget
> the URL)
I highly recommend this! ArrowPoint looks really neat, but
I've never used it (http://www.arrowpoint.com/).
> http://www.nthgencomp.com/
> (Terabyte arrays)
Very expensive, same with EMC, and Network Appliances. If you
haven't budgeted for $1M (or some large portion thereof), then you may
want to look at setting something close to the following up:
Internet
->
BIG-IP
->
First row of MX servers that forward to a large number 2nd
level mail servers using fastforward. All cdb files synced across the
front row servers, built on a regular time interval (once a minute)
from a database.
-> (use qmtp, qmqp if possible)
Second row of MX servers w/ IMAP, pop3, web access,
etc. that get user data off of an NFS server (use Maildir) format.
Use a quasi-dynamic DNS setup (recommend TinyDNS) to figure out where
to look for user Maildirs (username-host.mail.domain.com), and set the
TTLs to 5 seconds.
->
NFS servers - work horses that do nothing but serve Maildir data
via NFS w/ big raid drives.
> http://www.sun.com/
> (Servers that won't blow up under that load and Terabyte arrays)
http://www.freebsd.org/
Not to start anything, really, but I've run FreeBSD servers w/
an average load of 80-120 for years w/o them crashing or giving me
problems (where a Solaris E450 box folded, put its tails between its
legs, and walked away sniveling after days of configuration tweaks).
Linux: nice. Sun: better. FreeBSD: arrived at Mecca.
Motto: Design distributed with large numbers to scale quickly
and cheaply. BIG-IP and FreeBSD are your friends.
-sc
--
Sean Chittenden [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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