On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 01:40:15PM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Thomas Corell wrote:
I think Nick is right, getting a fast 'php' (Webserver) frontend for all the languages still running on pliny. And giving the database enought memory, and a fast RAID (striping is usually the version with fast read access, if I remember, feel free to correct me) will help to get a database-server only doing mysql and this hopefully at all his speed and memory.
How much priority should I give to RAID versus RAM for the db server, if there's a tradeoff? Does anyone really know the answer to that?
--Jimbo
RAM is more important than fast disks, but you really are going to want to have both. We're definitely not going to want to stripe these disks if we want reliability. Having two disks in RAID 0 is doing to double our chances of losing everything in a disk failure. We're going to probably want RAID 5, or RAID 10 at the worst.
Also, the reason why I gave my design is it is the cheapest way to get the most performance out of three machines. The other way (buying a machine to straight replace pliny) is certainly less work, but with considerably less performance benefit (unless you're willing to up the CPUs to dual Athlon 2800+ CPUs for an extra $314). RAID would also help, but that's going to cost an additional $1200 or so at the very least. In reality, we are likely going to need twice that $3000 to get a setup that is really going to perform appreciably better than our current setup.