On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 16:23:30 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
The ideas about squid caches etc are not about lightening the load on the database server
Ahem.
(which it wouldn't really do except insofar as it may cache more stuff than our present on-web-server caching), but about lightening and spreading out the load on the web servers. Squid caches will *not* help the immediate question here to a significant degree; anyway no more than making slight alterations to the present caching code to avoid checking timestamps in some cases would.
Our present alternatives for database duty are:
- Pliny, which has done it in the past. Exhibiting intermittent errors
on primary drive, and crashed a couple times when it ran the database again in late December, which is why we took it back off to Ursula.
- Carol (currently idle) with a SCSI drive that's too small for the
whole database.
Doesn't matter, that's what a replacement algo is for. There are much more sophisticated ones than LRU to pick from- both for ram and for disk.
- Susan (currently idle) with another IDE drive that's likely not the
fastest.
If these two servers have some Ram they'll be fine. We could even disallow disk caching all together, only using their Ram.