Wikitech-l January 2004

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

92 participants
148 discussions

Call for Configurations
by Jens Frank 10 Jan '04

10 Jan '04

Gabriel, Jimbo, list, many arguments have been sent to the list. I've got the impression that there's consensus about: * Having squid+round robin DNS+heartbeat, we won't need linux director for now. * One squid box of > 2GHz CPU and >=2GByte RAM is capable to host significantly more than the current workload of all servers, even when assuming doubling during the next year. * Redundancy is a must. * single host reliability can be "low" if the farm is available, so high end features are not required. * Many similar boxes provide higher flexibility than many different boxes. * backup box for the DB should have same CPU architecture than geoffrin (Well, perhaps no consensus here, but no one contradicted yet). * Current setup is a dual Athlon 1800 running apache and mysql and a second, somewhat slower machine. Overall performance is slow. Is this canonical? I'd draw the conclusion that, after taking away anonymous pageviews from the apache's (handing them over to squid) and after reviving geoffrin, the current web servers would be performant enough to handle the current workload. Looking at the trouble we had with pliny's stability, I'd prefer to replace them. I think, this is also common understanding. The "squid class" servers are at 1810$ at Silicon Mechanics (2,6 GHz P4, 2*1GB Mem, 2*80GB SATA, no CD). A Opteron box for the DB Backup server would be 2,810$ at penguincomputing.com. (Dual Opteron 240, 4*512MB RAM, 2*80GB ATA, no CD) 6,430$ spent on these. = Configuration = The question is whether to use 4 of the "squid-class" single CPU servers or two of the "DB Backup class" dual opterons. 4 of the small boxes would cost 7,240$. Two of the big servers would be at 5,620$. We would apparantly want to have at least one machine on site as hot spare part and for testing. This would be another "web server class" server, resulting in 5 small or 3 big ones, prices 9,050$ or 8,430$. Not much of a difference, so money will not make the decision. 4 small ones sounds more reliable, if the squids work properly. So that's 15,480$ in total. Summary: 2*squid, small server 4*web server, small server, 1*hot spare/test, small server, 1*DB backup, Opteron box. Comments? Re: nine 2 GHz boxes instead: those are hard to get, and a 2,6GHz CPU isn't that expensive any more, some 200$. It's not Xeon we're talking about. Best regards, JeLuF

9 22

Re: Move of datacenter
by Daniel Mayer 10 Jan '04

10 Jan '04

Jimbo wrote: >Directly in the new colo, because moving them once they are in service >would be very difficult. One of the things that has persuaded me to >move is that both Bomis and Wikimedia are about to undergo major >hardware upgrades, thus providing an easy opportuity for migration to >a new facility. Where is the new colo going to be? IMO it should be less than an hour away from Brion and/or Jason (preferably somewhere in-between where they both live). -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

2 1

Re: Why can't I ban Michael on Meta?
by Daniel Mayer 10 Jan '04

10 Jan '04

Tim wrote: >Wikipedia will forever be haunted by problems such as these, since, at >Anthere's request, I turned username blocking off by default. I'll turn >it on at meta. Are there any other wikis you want it enabled at, while >I'm at it? How about simple, wikibooks and wiktionary? Oh, I thought it was the other way around. Might as well enable it on simple, wikibooks and wiktionary. -- mav

2 1

Celeron vs. p4
by Jimmy Wales 09 Jan '04

09 Jan '04

Can anyone give me some perspective on this celeron vs p4 issue? For equivalent ghz, what's the difference likely to be *from the perspective of webserving*?

7 8

Thanks to everyone
by Jimmy Wales 09 Jan '04

09 Jan '04

I just really want to think everyone taking part in this discussion, I think it's really valuable and very helpful to me in figuring out what to do. I know it takes a lot of time to mull this over and visit the websites to look for configurations and actual pricing data, but wow, it is very very valuable. --Jimbo

3 2

Pliny etc
by Brion Vibber 09 Jan '04

09 Jan '04

I've tweaked pliny's apache config a bit; keepalive is now off and the max connections setting is turned up to the max of 255. This should keep connections from piling up and forcing new ones to queue up quite so often. Pliny's still having those 'bad sector' errors occasionally. Obviously it's a little worrying. :) Someone suggested a nice thorough fsck could get it appropriately marked bad and thus worked around; this could help once we've got something to take over for pliny sensibly and we can take it offline... Ursula is still straining with the databases; this is mostly disk-bound, on a slow disk. I don't really want to add the web serving on top of it. If we get geoffrin back online and working soon, ursula can take over for pliny while it's being fixed. And, of course, there's the New Machine; if the overheating problems are resolved and it works in the near future, I'd like to get it to replace larousse in serving en.wikipedia.org. This will get rid of the need for en2 until we get an all-around server farm set up. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

5 8

more google system quotes for the inclined
by Gabriel Wicke 09 Jan '04

09 Jan '04

From http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:kVfI1Wb2qmIJ:www.computer.org/micro/mi… "To provide sufficient capacity to handle query traffic, our service consists of multiple clusters distributed worldwide. Each cluster has around a few thousand machines, and the geographically distributed setup protects us against catastrophic data center failures (like those arising from earthquakes and large-scale power failures). A DNS-based load-balancing system selects a cluster by accounting for the user’s geographic proximity to each physical cluster. The load-balancing system minimizes round-trip time for the user’s request, while also considering the available capacity at the various clusters." Sounds like they're running a sort of Super Sparrow as well... Some strange pics: http://backrub.nerisoft.com/May1998/hardware.htm -- Gabriel Wicke

1 0

squid idea summary
by Gabriel Wicke 09 Jan '04

09 Jan '04

Hi, i've written a summary of my system ideas based on squid & SuperSparrow: http://www.aulinx.de/oss/code/wikipedia/ Cheers Gabriel Wicke

9 49

Celeron vs PIV
by Camille Constans 09 Jan '04

09 Jan '04

Celeron seems to be very crap according to Anandtech : http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=4 Flash needed I think Shaihulud

1 0

3 add'l machines tomorrow
by Jimmy Wales 09 Jan '04

09 Jan '04

If all goes well, Wikipedia will be able to use 3 add'l machines tomorrow. 1. Geoffrin is fixed, and Jason is stress testing it today. We got a new mobo from Penguin, no charge. 2. 'lb1' is an old bomis server -- it's a single Pentium 4 / IDE machine. Possibly not much help, but it has a gig of ram and can do some reasonable webserving. Possibly we should set this up as a squid, to test the squid idea now, so we'll be ready to go in 2-3 weeks when I setup the new cluster? 3. 'other other new machine' -- this is the one I loaned Wikipedia last time Jason went to SD, the one that fell off the net 30 minutes after Brion started trying to copy stuff to it. Jason things that the problem was overheating and can be solved with a reapplication of thermal paste. Obviously, I don't consider this to be a reliable machine, but it'll be there for us if we need it. --Jimbo

2 1

← Newer
1
...
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Older →

Jump to page:

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

Wikitech-l January 2004