Posted by samcohen on May 10, 2011 at 6:52pm
Hi.
I'm helping a company set up a Drupal 6 site that will be used as an intranet for its 20,000 employees. They estimate perhaps 1000 people logged in and using the site at once.
Because it's a difficult process for this company to upgrade the server later, they would like to start off with a box good enough to handle the traffic.
Can anyone recommend what type server to start out with or perhaps point me to something that might offer recommendations for server specs based on # of users.
thanks,
Sam
Comments
MySQL
Drop the money on a MySQL box. For PHP you can have 10 apache boxes point to 1 MySQL box; Drupal doesn't work well with 2 MySQL masters.
If you want the best MySQL box, go for SSD's with lots of ram. The apache boxes should have tons of ram because you will put memcache on them as well. The Percona 5.5 branch of MySQL is now stable so I would use it, as it contains a lot of the MySQL Facebook patches.
When setting up memcache; be sure to use session handling and locking
$conf['cache_inc'] = './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc';$conf['session_inc'] = './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache-session.inc';
$conf['lock_inc'] = './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache-lock.inc';
Any guidelines on the "lots
Any guidelines on the "lots of ram" issue. I don't want to suggest a $1000 a month server when a $300 a month server will probably be sufficient.
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How much Data do you have?
If you can get as much ram as your active data set, that's best. If not, get as much as you can afford. If you want to have 1000s of simultanious logged-in users, that's going to be resource-intensive.
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There's a nice presentation
There's a nice presentation (pdf) by Khalid Baheyeldin @ DrupalCamp Toronto, 2010 available here: http://2bits.com/sites/2bits.com/files/drupal-single-server-3.4-million-.... You might want to look at it.
It does not give a straight answer, but it gives lot's of good points for you to think.
--
Perttu Ehn
The reason that you're not
The reason that you're not getting a straight answer is that it's really going to be highly dependant on your site. If you don't/can't make good use of caching then you'll need beefier a MySQL server. If your queries require a lot of temp tables to disk then SSDs will really help. Having a lot of RAM on your MySQL box will only help up to the size of your dataset (i.e. If your database fits into 1GB of RAM, then having 16GB of RAM isn't going to do anything for you).
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Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
Bigger not always equals better (cost)
While you will want a beefy DB server, web-heads are sometimes another matter. Especially if you are going the cloud-server route.
With a site we currently maintain, we found that our bottleneck for authenticated traffic was CPU, rather than RAM We ran a bunch of benchmarks and did some cost comparisons and (at least with Rackspace) found that lots of their smaller machines (1GB) was more cost efficient in terms of requests/sec than a few big ones. This was mostly due to the fact that a 4 GB (or 8 GB) machine is not 4x faster than a 1GB RAM machine .. and with CPU being our overhead this was a key realization.
This is of course with anonymous traffic being served by varnish on our load balancer. So essentially, the web-heads only deal with authenticated traffic and non-cached pages. Everything memory intensive (besides php of course) is on other machines.
Consultants available for this work
Hmmm. I think answering this question will require hiring a consultant with specialty in this area -- as it's outside my comfort zone.
If any of you are available for that type of work I'd like to have my client contact you or your company directly.
If you are available to take on a few hours of work helping the client figure out the server specs for a 20,000 user site, can you contact me privately, or, better yet, reply to this message so that other people looking for consultants for this purpose can find you.
I'll pass your contact info to my client so that they can contact you directly.
Thanks,
Sam
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I think most of the people
I think most of the people that posted in this thread offer performance, scalability, and capacity planing services ;-)
Advomatic is however booked well into the summer in this area. Let us know if this timeline works for you.
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
The clients going to need
The clients going to need someone this month, so that timeline doesn't work, but if anyone is available now, would love to know.
NMS: Drupal Training & Services
www.new-media-solutions.com/drupal-training
Greater Philadelphia Drupal Meetup
www.meetup.com/drupaldelphia