Server Upgrade

May 26, 2000 12:07 PM

Just an FYI: thanks to the enormous generosity of my dad, there will be a new server for MetaFilter, which should be up sometime next week.

Lately the traffic has been killing the box, and memory is always being maxed out.

The new box will have more than double the horsepower in terms of Mhz and RAM. It'll be kickass.
posted by mathowie to uptime at 12:07 PM (7 comments total)

NOT A FLAME

are you locked into using NT? Allaire says they've ported the server to Linux, which would probably be a faster platform. I don't have any benchmarks, but every NT server I've replaced with Linux or *BSD runs more transactions per second on the same hardware.

I've never built a ColdFusion server, though, so there may be issues with that particular server. Any thoughts? Anecdotes? Does anyone have any benchmarks?

I'm NOT trying to start an OS war; I believe in using the right tool for the job, not in making a religion out of my software. I'm just curious what people's experiences are with ColdFusion on different platforms.
posted by katchomko at 6:31 PM on May 28, 2000

I've got a Cold Fusion Linux beta running on a server in my apartment.

P90 with 64MB of RAM and RedHat 6.1, Postgresql 6.5 and a pretty recent version of Apache. I haven't done any server pounding or even paid very close attention to logs or run any benchmarks. It does run though, and I haven't had any problems with it crashing or crazy memory leaks. You'd have a bit of a struggle running NT4, CF, IIS and SQL Server on that machine though ... so that's something.

Depending on what the hosting situation is for MetaFilter, it could be interesting to set up the new server with NT/CF/SQL Server and Linux/CF on the old box and set ODBC on the Linux machine to hit the SQL server. Then see what the Linux box is capable of.

Fun to play with and learn, anway. :-)
posted by treebjen at 1:00 AM on May 29, 2000

Cool, thanks for the info! Does CF need RedHat, or could you run it on slack? I've run benchmarks on Apache and MySql, and slack is about 5% faster (less daemon overhead, and slack is a lot nicer about letting you partition your disks to put your content right under the needles). Does CF require Postgresql? MySql's transaction through put is a generally a bit faster since it opens and closes sockets better. Again, I'm not trying to start a war... just kickin' around ideas of what the ultimate CF box would look like.

yeah, it'd be great if mathowie runs the old box and the new box side by side. I'd wager the Linux box will hold it's own up to about .5 hits per second, then the extra RAM in the new box will make all the difference in the world.
posted by katchomko at 11:42 AM on May 29, 2000

It supposedly requires RedHat 6.1 or 6.2 ... libc v. glibc problems or something of that nature.

The CF install includes drivers for INFORMIX 7x 9x, Sybase 11, Oracle 8, MS SQL and MySQL out of the box. But you can also hook it up to ODBC and whatever you can get to work there. At the time I installed the first beta so long ago it only came with Oracle and Sybase 11 drivers I think. I decided to go with Postgres for no real good reason except that it seemed a bit more impressive.
posted by treebjen at 12:56 PM on May 29, 2000

does it come in a tarball or rpm? Is it a set of extensions to apache, or did allaire start from scratch? Dang, now you have my curiosity piqued.
posted by katchomko at 3:59 PM on May 29, 2000

It's got its own custom install script that installs a server and an apache module.
posted by treebjen at 9:03 PM on May 29, 2000

I'm going to have to get a copy and play with it. Thanks for the info!
posted by katchomko at 12:31 PM on May 30, 2000