On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 12:52 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: Is a GigE switch ordered as well? The two FastE ones are a bottleneck currently which messes with the load balancing. All machines have GigE nics already.

I have ordered some new servers. I believe that they will resolve several significant issues. 1. NFS Fileserver -- for now, only 1 of these, as I was told that gwicke wants to do some tests before we buy 2 of them. Dual Opteron 242 1 Gb ram (2x512), leaving 6 slots available 3Ware 9500S-8 8 port RAID controller 6x250GB drives (750GB HW RAID 10) floppy Sony 52x CDROM IDE 460W hotswap redundant power supplies Fedora Core 2 for AMD64 2. Search DB server -- same machine as above, except... 6x200GB drives (600GB HW RAID 10) 4 GB ram (4x1gb), leaving 4 slots available 3. Apaches -- In what may be a slightly controversial decision, but supported by Shaihulud and Jeronim in the irc room, and probably a tossup to most people, I went with a "known quantity" and ordered 8 1U Pentium 4 machines. P4 3.0GHZ - 1 MB Cache - HT - 800FSB 512MB (2x256) - leaving 2 slots available 80GB ATA100 hard drive My thinking here is that this will roughly *double* our apache capacity, thus definitively solving (for now) what has been a longstanding issue. This may expose something else as a bottleneck, we don't know yet. There was a lot of talk about going with dual opterons in this capacity, and it was once decided. But lately there has been some concern about the performance of suda, and some difficulties (possibly) with having a non-homegenous group of apaches. I have seen arguments back and forth, and did not find any of them definitive. So, I made a decision. That's what I have to do, and I hope no one is mad about it. :-) --Jimbo