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Official Server Upgrade discussion

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So the question is, what do you want BP running on?
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Definitely not a Dell :)


specifically Standard Edition supports 2GB
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Pretty sad isnt it?


And I coulda SWORE this site ran on BSD. Had thought I remembered Clarity or someone mentioning that in the past. That is the beauty of using linux, you get everything up and running, then ya dont have to touch it. Windows causes you to reboot once a day :)
 
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Clarity said:
We're on FreeBSD now. Some flavor of Unix is a must, and I am partial to what we're using now. So OS is a non-issue, we want no part of any flavor of windows. Slap FreeBSD on a box, install mySQL and php, and I'm more or less able to get done what I need to make the site live and breathe.

As far as me offering a budget, I don't have that luxury. We'll spec out and target a machine somewhere with a certain load-out, make that our goal, and work towards that. That's a different path than I've ever gone before, but BP is no business. :)

The goal is not to spend as much money as possible. The site *will* have future expenses, and being slightly ahead would be a good thing. The goal *is* to have a powerful and reliable machine. Not surprisingly, there seem to be a wide range of opinions on what's appropriate, what's not, etc. Same issue I faced before, just on a smaller scale. Quite a few people here deal with IS/IT issues professionally. So the question is, what do you want BP running on?
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Boy -- that response surely opens the door to a much more "right-priced" system. No Win2K3 Server, FreeBSD instead. You just raked four figures back off the table.

Clarity, your are on the money about budgets. Spending all "extra cash" on other components, just because you may have to spend less on the OS is not an ideal solution. Agree that you should buy what you need and then some, within reason.

That should then play a role in any specs for the server. Specifically, you may even think in terms of a motherboard that allows later addition of more memory modules. (Memory will likely be your next biggest $ item now that Windows Server 2K3 is eliminated from consideration). So you install 4--8GB (or whatever you determine provides a de minimus safety margin) later you can upgrade to 16GB, 32GB and so on.

Same philosophy might apply to the RAID 1/2 set-up I suppose.

Then your remaining decision is whether to be a blade runner or a Tower of Power architecture.
 
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FreeBSD will take advantage of Physical Address Extensions (PAE) support on CPUs that support this feature. A kernel with the PAE feature enabled will detect memory above 4 gigabytes and allow it to be used by the system. This feature places constraints on the device drivers and other features of FreeBSD which may be used; consult the pae(4) manpage for more details.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/hardware-i386.html#MISC

The PAE option provides support for the physical address extensions capability of the Intel Pentium Pro and above CPUs, and allows for up to 64 gigabytes of memory to be used in systems capable of supporting it. With the PAE option, memory above 4 gigabytes is simply added to the general page pool. The system makes no distinction between memory above or below 4 gigabytes, and no specific facility is provided for a process or the kernel to access more memory than they would otherwise be able to access, through a sliding window or otherwise.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pae&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+5.3-RELEASE
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...
 
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If Linux, or something like RedHat (or any other variant of Linux) handles memory better, I'm not opposed to that.

After FreeBSD, Linux would be my top preference. One upside to Linux is contract-types willing to do sysadmin work are *much* easier to find online than FreeBSD people are. I've had a hell of a time just getting simple FreeBSD work (patching, upgrading, installing something like qmail) done in the past, in fact, the server still needs more now.

So maybe Linux should be the top choice. *shrug*.

What I'm looking for right now, is for someone to point out a company that is known for building solid machines, and having (ideally) US-based customer/tech support. We can then spec out a machine to our needs with them, and use that as a very clear target for our current drive goals.

We could also buy individual parts, put the whole thing together, and go that way. I have no problem with that. I could assemble it here, and get the OS going enough that the machine could be online that someone from the site with enough of a Unix clue could connect and set everything up. But that's the catch, we're talking remotely trying to build a kernel, install things like mysql and php, configure access -- plus there's the concern about the machine shipping in less-than perfect working order, etc.

In a perfect scenario, an existing company builds the machine, loads the OS, tests everything, ships it to the hosting facility, who puts it online next to the current box. At which point I can find someone with a clue to install and configure it to meet my/BP's needs. At which point I can install a fresh and current copy of vBulletin, hack in all of our modifications, then copy over and convert the database. At which point, we could switch DNS info, and transition the "live" site to the new box.

Then the old box becomes a development box. A different machine to get a twice daily database backup, perhaps handle some image loading, mail, other light tasks.
 
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All depends on what you wanna spend. Or I should say what you have to spend. Ordering components, building yourself, will save you quite a chunk. But you're right, having it done, tested, OS installed, is a nice thing. I am gonna look some stuff up when I get to work, see what kinda deals I can find that includes all that, as well as support.
 
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Clarity spoke: After FreeBSD, Linux would be my top preference. .... What I'm looking for right now, is for someone to point out a company that is known for building solid machines
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Here is one such Linux experienced entity. They are certainly not the cheapest. Mind you, sometimes you get what you pay for. Mightneed to talk to them about RAID configurations as there seems to be a gap between claims and offerings in their configurator.
 
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Well only a few things I'll mention about the link you posted there sandgk.

One is that on a production server machine, Fedora Core is not the way to go. It may be developed with help from RedHat, but it is not supported directly by RedHat. So we would probobaly want to look at using Enterprise Edition. Granted, Fedora Core is nice, as I use Fedora Core 4 Test 1 at work for one of my machines.

Here's one I kinda drew up from that site.. not much different.. but definately not 4 Blade servers...

http://www.penguincomputing.com/products/servers/bladerunner.php?tabname=BRBSVA&bcid=16182

and yes we'd want to talk about the RAID options.
 
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LloydSev said:
Well only a few things I'll mention about the link you posted there sandgk.

One is that on a production server machine, Fedora Core is not the way to go. It may be developed with help from RedHat, but it is not supported directly by RedHat. So we would probobaly want to look at using Enterprise Edition. Granted, Fedora Core is nice, as I use Fedora Core 4 Test 1 at work for one of my machines.

Here's one I kinda drew up from that site.. not much different.. but definately not 4 Blade servers...

http://www.penguincomputing.com/products/servers/bladerunner.php?tabname=BRBSVA&bcid=16182

and yes we'd want to talk about the RAID options.
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You know I didn't notice till you posted a link to a version meant to show the Enterprise edition that it always defaults to showing Fedora Core on page load. Your right LloydSev that Enterprise would be a better choice.

What worried me the most was the lack of Clarity (pun intended) concerning the Raid options. Their price is certainly attractive enough, though more Clarity is needed about the price of your starter blade and enclosure.
 
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Ok, I just came to this thread, so excuse me if I'm behind.

I was responsible for purchasing a new server, 5 computers, monitors, printers, etc for our small office about a year ago.

What exactly is the needs for this site? You want reliability and performance for a good price; however you're not going to be running system hogging programs, right?

What kind of services is this server going to present to the community? Is it going to host a lot of content (photos, audio, movies, etc?) or is it going to be used much like it is now - just a hell of a lot faster?

Honestly, an $8 grand server seems like extreme overkill for what you need it for. My entire office package (what is listed above) cost 9 grand - including a professional installation and data migration - obviously the needs are different, but you get the idea.

Forum software is not very CPU intensive, it just requires good RAM to run efficiently. Unless you are hosting a lot of audio and video CPU power and extemely fast hard drives are also not essential.

Windows server is also extreme overkill - you're not networking an entire office together, just putting a webserver up. It's easy to want a Bentley, when all you need is a reliable Honda. There is a cost point where all you're going to do is spend a ton of money and won't see a benefit from the pretty additions.

What I feel is important (take this with a grain of salt, as I don't know all what you plan to do):

Processors are running very inexpensive today and are really powerful: An AMD 64 3.4 ghz processor is all you would really need. Comparable Xeons are fantastic, but it's like driving a nail with a sledgehammer. Going with Dual processors might be worth considering, but Xeon processors would be just overkill.

RAM: What will keep the forums fast. 4 gigs is a TON - any more than that and I doubt you'll see a benefit. If it were me I'd go with a quality 2 gigs, possibly 4. Again, this is easily scalable - if you find out that you don't have enough ram - you can always add to it. here's a part where you could save some serious cash and add to it at a later date (or fundraiser) if need be.

Storage: Raid is the way to go, but how much redundancy do you need? Raid 0 or 1, with 2 large hard drives imo, is all you'll need here. At the most 10,000 RPM drives is all you need. 7,200 is what I would use - fast enough to run forum applications, databases, and some media. If you aren't going to store a ton of files on the server, then you can easily scale back on size and go for some speed.

Motherboard: Forget the frills and go for functionality.

Case: It's important to have a quality case. Good size, expandability, and one that allows for fans and cooling. Antec is among the best.
Also, I would use at least a 400W power supply. Here's a good one.

Now the priced out system here doesn't include any software, extra fans, monitor, keyboard, etc. Just the server itself. The price is low enough where you could easily add some serious quality without it breaking the budget.
 
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DA, this is what Clarity wrote in the first post:

Our problems are query related. Which speaks to the database. Every time you load a page here, you alone are querying the database between 15 and 30 times on average. Just you, on every single page. So imagine for a moment, 300 viewers (registered or not) browsing a new page every 20 seconds. That's (very roughly) 20,250 database queries a minute. 1.2 million queries an hour. By blocking unregistered people, I'm not stopping their queries, only reducing them. So if you see an improvement in performance following that change I made today, it's because we might have (arbitrary numbers follow) gone from 1.2 million queries an hour, to 800k an hour. But you can appreciate how, as we continue to grow, these issues will compound. More queries means more processing.

When I log directly into the server, I run a command called 'top', which tells me what the server load is, and how the system resources are being spent. To those here familar with such things, we average around 1.5, and spike as high as 4. Anytime there are around 250-300 people here, we're averaging around 3. Our CPU averages around 85% capacity used, but get up over 200 people on the site (registered and non-registered combined, so that's common) and it's fully strained. We have a gig of ram, and that's basically always being used to its maximum capacity these days. BP runs on FreeBSD, using PHP and mySQL. But the machine itself can only handle so much.

The box itself has dual 1GHz procs, and 1 gig of ram. 3 years or so ago, this was fine for the purpose the machine was built for. I think it ran about $3k at the time for the company that purchased it. Today, we need a box with 4gb ram just to get by with our current traffic and features. 8gb ram if we're going to continue to grow, and add features like the stats engine.
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DA, what was the main purpose of the server you put together? Was it handling large amounts of Web queries, or was it more of a file/print server?

I would think that 2 gigs of RAM is not going to do more than put a small bandaid on a large problem. 4 gigs would probably be adequate, but would probably require another upgrade relatively soon once the stats engine is added and membership traffic grows. I think the idea of waiting a bit longer and completely setting the site up for the future is the way to go. Otherwise most people wouldn't understand the need for another server upgrade so soon, and probably wouldn't donate again. I'm sure nobody really enjoys pushing for donations, so if we can hook up a server that will last well into the future and not have another huge fundraising project for a few years, I'm all for it.

I work more on the client end, so I don't have enough knowledge of servers specifically to say what our requirements are, but I trust that Clarity is familiar enough with the current operations to know what we need. Everybody with anything to add is welcome to throw their hat into the ring. We can definitely use all the technical help we can get with this project.
 
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