I have ordered some new servers. I believe that they will resolve
several significant issues.
1. NFS Fileserver -- for now, only 1 of these, as I was told that
gwicke wants to do some tests before we buy 2 of them.
Dual Opteron 242
1 Gb ram (2x512), leaving 6 slots available
3Ware 9500S-8 8 port RAID controller
6x250GB drives (750GB HW RAID 10)
floppy
Sony 52x CDROM IDE
460W hotswap redundant power supplies
Fedora Core 2 for AMD64
2. Search DB server --
same machine as above, except...
6x200GB drives (600GB HW RAID 10)
4 GB ram (4x1gb), leaving 4 slots available
3. Apaches --
In what may be a slightly controversial decision, but supported by
Shaihulud and Jeronim in the irc room, and probably a tossup to most
people, I went with a "known quantity" and ordered 8 1U Pentium 4
machines.
P4 3.0GHZ - 1 MB Cache - HT - 800FSB
512MB (2x256) - leaving 2 slots available
80GB ATA100 hard drive
My thinking here is that this will roughly *double* our apache
capacity, thus definitively solving (for now) what has been a
longstanding issue. This may expose something else as a bottleneck,
we don't know yet.
There was a lot of talk about going with dual opterons in this
capacity, and it was once decided. But lately there has been some
concern about the performance of suda, and some difficulties
(possibly) with having a non-homegenous group of apaches.
I have seen arguments back and forth, and did not find any of them
definitive. So, I made a decision. That's what I have to do, and I
hope no one is mad about it. :-)
--Jimbo