The following order is proposed to get ahead of apache/memcached and squid needs for a few weeks (or maybe a bit longer.. .maybe:)) This will take the sites to about 50 servers.

For anyone who missed the last few days, we hit 1300 requests per second sustained on Monday and more Apache capability is needed to handle much more than that, as well as to allow for the inevitable failures. Still have 4-5 broken machines but those won't be fixed soon enough.

In other news, real transfer rates went to the limit of a 100 megabit/s connection on Monday and it appears that it'll be necessary to have the gigabit fiber module installed and in service to handle next Monday's load, if not sooner.

Switching for this order is to be handled by going to signle connections, internal only, for all apaches not doing squid or memcached duty. Discussion of the core switch seems just about done but won't be necessary for this order (the next is another matter...:)) Likely to be around US$7,000 if Cisco is unwilling to donate - and probably aren't going ot be ready to go ahead soon enough to matter, since the US gov IRS has until March to respond and CIsco says up to 90 days.. so best to brace for spending that money and using Cisco for access/apache/database type switches, if they are willing.

A master database server order, with lots of drive capability (12-16) to be master of a split off en+ja server set is planned soon. Likely to be 16GB dual Opteron with many 140GB 15,00 RPM SCSI disks for around $15,000 initially.

Suda is working fine as master - no load issues with it at near-record traffic levels on Monday and it appears to have plenty of requests and disk capacity for a few months.

4 iServ R100 "squid or memcached/apache" CPU: Intel P4 540 (3.2GHz) 1MB Cache - HT - 800 FSB LGA775 RAM: 3GB (2 x 1GB, 2 x 512MB) DDRII-533 - Interleaved Management: IPMI 2.0 Controller Hot-Swap HDD : Seagate 200GB 7200.7 (7.2Krpm-8MB Cache-NCQ) SATA Low Profile CD-ROM: Slimline 24X CD-ROM Floppy: 1.44MB Floppy WARRANTY: Standard 3 Year - Return to Depot NOTES: Fedora Core3 or recommend $1896.00 $7584.00

6 iServ R100 "apache" CPU: Intel P4 540 (3.2GHz) 1MB Cache - HT - 800 FSB LGA775 RAM: 512MB (2 x 256MB) DDRII-533 - Interleaved Management: IPMI 2.0 Controller Hot-Swap HDD : Seagate 200GB 7200.7 (7.2Krpm-8MB Cache-NCQ) SATA Low Profile CD-ROM: Slimline 24X CD-ROM Floppy: 1.44MB Floppy WARRANTY: Standard 3 Year - Return to Depot NOTES: Fedora Core3 or recommend $1221.00 $7326.00 Total: $14910.00

Was some discussion of alternative CPUs for benchmarking. Getting the easy machines purchased and installed soon before I go to bed came before getting fancy with this order...:)