Gabriel, Jimbo, list,
many arguments have been sent to the list. I've got the impression that there's consensus about:
* Having squid+round robin DNS+heartbeat, we won't need linux director for now. * One squid box of > 2GHz CPU and >=2GByte RAM is capable to host significantly more than the current workload of all servers, even when assuming doubling during the next year. * Redundancy is a must. * single host reliability can be "low" if the farm is available, so high end features are not required. * Many similar boxes provide higher flexibility than many different boxes. * backup box for the DB should have same CPU architecture than geoffrin (Well, perhaps no consensus here, but no one contradicted yet). * Current setup is a dual Athlon 1800 running apache and mysql and a second, somewhat slower machine. Overall performance is slow.
Is this canonical?
I'd draw the conclusion that, after taking away anonymous pageviews from the apache's (handing them over to squid) and after reviving geoffrin, the current web servers would be performant enough to handle the current workload. Looking at the trouble we had with pliny's stability, I'd prefer to replace them. I think, this is also common understanding.
The "squid class" servers are at 1810$ at Silicon Mechanics (2,6 GHz P4, 2*1GB Mem, 2*80GB SATA, no CD).
A Opteron box for the DB Backup server would be 2,810$ at penguincomputing.com. (Dual Opteron 240, 4*512MB RAM, 2*80GB ATA, no CD)
6,430$ spent on these.
= Configuration = The question is whether to use 4 of the "squid-class" single CPU servers or two of the "DB Backup class" dual opterons. 4 of the small boxes would cost 7,240$. Two of the big servers would be at 5,620$.
We would apparantly want to have at least one machine on site as hot spare part and for testing. This would be another "web server class" server, resulting in 5 small or 3 big ones, prices 9,050$ or 8,430$. Not much of a difference, so money will not make the decision.
4 small ones sounds more reliable, if the squids work properly.
So that's 15,480$ in total.
Summary: 2*squid, small server 4*web server, small server, 1*hot spare/test, small server, 1*DB backup, Opteron box.
Comments?
Re: nine 2 GHz boxes instead: those are hard to get, and a 2,6GHz CPU isn't that expensive any more, some 200$. It's not Xeon we're talking about.
Best regards,
JeLuF