[thelist] (Intel + Linux) vs (Sun + Solaris)

Judah McAuley judah at wiredotter.com
Fri Apr 12 21:19:01 CDT 2002


Evolt currently runs  on CF, Linux, Apache and Oracle and did about 2.4
million
hits for March.  It's certainly doable to scale that up to a site such
as yours.

As to the question of whether you *should* switch to Intel/Linux, well
that's another question.  Fundamentally, I'd trust the head tech guy
because he's the one that who is going to be taking care of it.  If he
feels that he can do a better job running Linux/Intel rather than
Solaris/Sparc, then he's probably going to do a better job running
Linux/Intel.

Specific recommendations I'd make:

Keep one of the small Solaris boxes as a mail server.  Mail will happily
sit there and hum along with little or no intervention for a long time.
  And it usually runs just fine on "legacy" hardware.  Qmail (the mail
server I use) will process several hundred thousand messages a day on a
P-90.

To keep up with expected growth, start preparing yourself for a cluster
configuration.  That provides you with the most robust and easily scaled
system configuration.  But it also means training your tech folks and
probably rewriting portions of your CF code.  If you wanted a cheap
ease-in solution, you could buy a new Intel box and stick CF and Apache
on it and keep Sybase on your dual processor Solaris box.  This would
lessen the load on both machines and make it so you don't have to buy a
new license for Sybase (an expensive proposition).  Then you can add on
new CF/Apache boxes as web load increases and eventually move the DB to
a new beefier machine (say a 64 bit Intel processor).  I think that you
would have to get a new version of Sybase if you wanted to run it under
Linux and its probably best to move as few pieces at a time as you can
to avoid making mistakes.  Put all web/db machines on a local 100/1000Mb
network and you can ease yourself into a cluster configuration one
machine at a time instead of committing whole hog and replacing everything.

Also, I know that the next version of Cold Fusion is in beta so I would
expect a new version to be out in the not so far future.  This is the
version that's rewritten from the ground up in Java so big changes are
likely in order.  You might want to wait and take a look at system
requirements and performace specs for the new CF before you make a
decision on what platform and machine to go with.  It could have a
pretty big impact on what your perceived needs are.

Hope that helps,
Judah

> 4/12/2002 7:50:59 PM, Mo Martin <mo_ee at bigfoot.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>We're running into capacity limits on our web hardware
> and my head technical guy is suggesting a switch from Solaris
> running on Sun
> hardware to Linux running on Intel processors. I trust
> him but want some additional opinions.
>
> It's a mid-sized corporate site serving about a million
> visitors a month. 4M pages a month about 50-75% of which are fed
> from the database. Steady, predictable growth but quite rapid --
>
> more than doubling each year. The site serves pages and dat
> sheets, no transactions or e-commerce.
>
> We run three Solaris machines (Sun CPUs) now but one
> does all the work. It runs Sybase 7 and Cold Fusion 4.5, and Apache.
>
> It's a three-year-old old machine with dual 330 MHz
> processors. The other machines are single-processor 300 MHz versions
> just serving HTML, mail, and PDFs. One also runs Lyris, a list server,
> at fairly low volume. All the machines are at a co-lo -- we own and
> run them, they house them and provide bandwidth.
>
> The choice is between buying a newer Sun server and RAID array; or
> going with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 with RAID array for around $4500.
>
> He also is suggesting we consolidate our processes. We have Cold
> Fusion and Sybase on one machine; and two separate machines sharing
> the HTML serving and mail functions. He wants to put it all on one
> box (and use the old boxes as spares/backups).
>
> Primary desire is for reliability and performance.
>
> Thoughts?




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