On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 04:13:57 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I want to think more about fileservers today. I'm assuming that those are primarily for the images? Can/should they be more or less the same configuration as the 6 apaches?
Nooo- the opposite! Apaches don't use their disk but need a lot of cpu, the fileservers will need little cpu and a good RAID1. It's only about 2 Gigs of pics at the moment (are there sound files yet?), let's just store them on the DB servers' filesystem. Those will be connected with heartbeat anyway, no extra work for failover. If wikipedia suddenly starts to use a lot of big media files we can easily move the files to separate servers.
I think there's enormous flexibility benefits of having lots of identical hardware, *when it makes sense* to do so. When it doesn't make sense, it doesn't. I.E. if we have 1 box that needs to be 'bigger' in some ways, there's no sense in spending money on 6 other boxes just to make them all identical.
Especially for the Apaches- they'd cost at least double the necessary price while still being unsuitable for DB or Squid.
But if the requirements are roughly similar for different roles, then we shouldn't try to overspecialize the hardware, I think.
The only real specialization for the Apaches is no Raid. Easy to add (what for, by the way?). We could stick more ram into the apaches and use them as Squids, i don't think it's feasible to use them for the main DB. Although- ram does wonders...
We should really get information about the minimum ram needed for the Apaches!