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Performance Questions - Hardware Choices / Configuration

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Performance Questions - Hardware Choices / Configuration
Hi folks...

I'm planning to deploy Gossamer Forums on a fairly large scale shortly. My estimate is about 100 million forum postings will be online within one year of launch. Best guess is 100,000 ***visitors*** per day to the site.

I'm considering a front end web server plus a backend MySQL server.

Questions:

1. dualcore or quadcore under CentOS? Does it really matter?
2. 32 bit or 64 bit version of CentOS? Everyone tells me bigger is better - MySQL, Apache, Postfix is main applications
3. disk space - for 100 million postings, what's the estimated amount of disk space for MySQL? What's the estimated disk space for the webserver portion? Attachments will be limited in size and minimal in the first place
4. SATA drives ok for this application? I use a lot of SAS drives in some other applications but trying to keep costs reasonable on this project
5. Internal search best for GForums? I know with Links, the internal search worked MUCH better when searching several million entires such as a DMOZ mirror..
6. RAM - 8 Gig enough on a MySQL database of this size? I'm thinking of 4 Gig on the webserver

Overkill, not enough? I'm open to ideas - if I could get away with it, I would do this all on one server but I think breaking it into two servers might be wiser from a performance perspective....

Thanks for any input - sorry for all the questions.. want to order the hardware shortly and hoping to start with the right requirements for year one at least...;)

Paul
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Re: [pauls] Performance Questions - Hardware Choices / Configuration In reply to
Wow, may I ask what the forum is for?....those are some hefty numbers.
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Re: [Wychwood] Performance Questions - Hardware Choices / Configuration In reply to
I need to archive a LOT of email messages...;)
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Re: [pauls] Performance Questions - Hardware Choices / Configuration In reply to
Alex is the one to answer such questions, but he's currently out of town, so it might take a couple days to reply. One interesting thing is that MySQL doesn't scale well after four cores (http://anandtech.com/...aspx?i=3162&p=10), so it wouldn't be worthwhile to get more than 4 cores for a dedicated MySQL server. Also, the article mentions that the 5.1.22 release candidates are up to 70% faster than the 5.0.2x release! They don't go into specifics there though.

Adrian
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Re: [brewt] Performance Questions - Hardware Choices / Configuration In reply to
brewt wrote:
Alex is the one to answer such questions, but he's currently out of town, so it might take a couple days to reply. One interesting thing is that MySQL doesn't scale well after four cores (http://anandtech.com/...aspx?i=3162&p=10), so it wouldn't be worthwhile to get more than 4 cores for a dedicated MySQL server. Also, the article mentions that the 5.1.22 release candidates are up to 70% faster than the 5.0.2x release! They don't go into specifics there though.

Thanks - I did talk to Alex last week on this .. was just looking for more input from users who are running "larger" installations ;) I can trim the overall number down if the load gets too heavy (purging older messages) but want to keep it as large as possible from a searching perspective.....

Best!
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Re: [pauls] Performance Questions - Hardware Choices / Configuration In reply to
Hi,

The largest installation I know of, is dropzone.com. It has 3million+ posts I believe. Not really anywhere near your figures, but that doesn't mean its not possible =)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
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