After a few days of experimenting with configuration, and about a day
running one server as a test, we've now got 13 web servers online and
serving pages out of the batch delivered last week.
These are spiffy Opteron boxes, nice and fast, and should help take the
load off the other apache boxen quite nicely.
For now the Opteron apaches are running with APC as the opcode cache
rather than the Turck MMCache we're using on the Pentiums. We used to
use APC a couple years ago and it was a bit flakier then, but the
current version seems to be much more responsive with performance in
line with the competition* and is being actively maintained to work with
current versions of PHP.
*
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Turck_vs_APC_benchmark
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)