On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 14:06:57 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:
The default configuration for using Linux Director would be no load balancing at all and one machine on standby with Heartbeat. We could do the same with the squids, but it makes more sense to use both machine's ram.
I'm not sure I'm following you here. If we have 2 Linux Directors, one on standby, but they aren't doing load balancing, then what are they for? I thought the director would be in charge of (iptables style) load balancing the squids?
Yes, but the two Linux Director wouldn't be load balanced because each of them can deal with the full traffic. Same for the Squids, but it wouldn't hurt to use them both.
for cpu, but for future memory expansion. I think Raid isn't necessary for the squid if the logging is done to a separate disk.
*nod* But RAID could be used in mirroring mode to increase reliability, presumably...
Yes, i'm not against RAID at all- i just wanted to stretch that 4Gigs of ram might be more important than the most advanced five-dics RAID. If we have enough money- then fine. The Squids will do all the logging- so the disk will be accessed regularly.
I'm listening to your thought that maybe going with a 64 bit CPU might make more sense just from the point of view of more RAM potential in the future. It's just very hard today to predict whether that's the right path to take or not.
I'm not shure either. 4Gigs will carry a long way i guess (especially with the 'join' configuration of the Squids)- and accessing a few bigger files from disk won't be a performance problem. By the time a memory upgrade would be beneficial a full machine with that amount of ram (of possibly a different kind then) might cost no more. So x86 with 4Gigs might be fine as well- cpu-wise anyway.
One can only assume that RAM will be a lot cheaper in the future, and it sure would be nice to spend $1600 per machine to upgrade to 16Gb.
The question is if this is really needed that soon- if the load really explodes we could start adding mirrors which would also save some bandwidth. Once the envisoned setup is running the next step is mainly about a DNS thing like SuperSparrows. Squid3 is scheduled for release this spring- with ESI this can lower the load drastically again. __
Gabriel Wicke