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Posted by: JoeDeth
What size hard drives are you running on the t.com servers?
Just curious.
TIA
Posted by: Ritsui
/dev/hda 61.4GB
/dev/sda 18.3GB
/dev/sdb 18.3GB
Total is just under 100gb. That's smaller than we had wanted (due to budget restraints and hardware donations which never materialized), but it's still more than twice what we had before the rebuild. The hardware is fairly well described on the last page of the broken T.com donation thread and there are real time stats at http://tc1.srohosting.com (storage space shows only 85.9 gb because we left an unformatted partition in reserve).
Any particular reason?
Posted by: bazie
"Load Av: 0.01, 0.01, 0.00 (1 min, 5 min, 15 min)
Memory: 2058 mb total, 77% (1579 mb) free
"
What does Load av refer to exactly?
Right now is quite a down time on tcom...but at peak times...does tcom begin to put strain on the new server specs at all?
Posted by: Ritsui
Load average is usually defined as the average number of processes waiting on cpu time slices over 1, 5 and 15 minute intervals. It's not exactly that, but close enough. In a nutshell, a 1 minute load average of 1.0 means that there has been an average of one process waiting on CPU time over the last minute. With 140 or so running processes right now (about 60 apache/mysql processes for the forums) and a load below 0.10, you can see that none of them have to wait very long for CPU time.
As for 'strain', basically, no  . The forum doesn't strain the server much at all even with 50+ users online; which puts the load around 0.35 or so. But that's forum load only. The nice thing now is we can almost always do things like backups, database maintenance, etc. without shutting the forums down and it's barely even noticable. On the old server we would either shut the forums down or watch the load run into double digits for even minor maintenance.
Posted by: bazie
ahh, cleverness
Ya tcom hasn't been down since the new thing iirc
Posted by: JoeDeth
Thanks for the reply.
Just curious because I'm building a small box with the intent of hosting my own forums (I'll put the box up at work), and I was curious about hd space & useage.
I'll either use 3 IDE drives, 1 for OS and 2 in mirror mode for data/forums (I have a test box configged & set up this way now) or I'll hardware RAID5 3 hd's using 2 partitions (1 for OS and 1 for data/forums), which would be the more expensive route.
Posted by: Ritsui
I wouldn't say amount of disk space should be one of your major concerns when you can get 100gb IDE drives fairly cheap. It's only when you need faster disk I/O and move to SCSI that it gets really expensive. More important to your hardware choices is how busy and what size do you expect the forums will be immediately and over the next two years? One of the big reasons Tcom needs a good chunk of CPU power for "medium" traffic forums (less than 100 users online) is the size of the database. A 1.8gb database means huge amounts of data in memory and lots of disk I/O and CPU time to search and do inserts. That's why we needed 2gb ram and SCSI drives.
As for RAID... my advice would be to use RAID for redundancy if you have the budget... but not for speed unless you expect your forums to be extremely busy (several times busier than here) AND have a grand or so to spend. Trust me, cheap IDE RAID can be far less reliable than a single normal drive and in most cases with forums, you are better off putting that kind of money into RAM for caching. If you DO go RAID, don't skimp on the controller.
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