in reply to Re^3: LAMP svrs - 1 or 2 is best ?
in thread LAMP svrs - 1 or 2 is best ?

so do you have some stats for comparison between using 1 and n servers ? in terms of performance? would I be able to serve 1000 users at 20 secs per page, or 100 users at 1 second per page ? If I buy a car I like to know how much better it is going to perform than my current one, I already know it will cost me more to run because it's a bigger car...

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Re^5: LAMP svrs - 1 or 2 is best ?
by gellyfish (Monsignor) on May 10, 2005 at 15:02 UTC

    Sorry you are being confusing now, you are switching from questions of availability to performance and back again. With a database (unless the engine has been specifically designed to work like this) you are unlikely to get any performance increase from adding any more servers above the first one that is running that database, indeed it is simply going to add more administrative overhead. Adding processors (and memory) to a single server is far more likely to reward you with a performance increase (as long as your OS and RDBMS support SMP).

    /J\

Re^5: LAMP svrs - 1 or 2 is best ?
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on May 10, 2005 at 15:10 UTC
    I once took over an application that was running on a 2-CPU webserver w/4GB RAM going against a 4-CPU DB server with 8GB RAM running a tuned Oracle database with a real DBA administering it. It was dog-slow, like 4 minutes a page. I rewrote it to go against an untuned MySQL database I randomly threw together running on a hyperthreaded single-cpu desktop w/2GB that was also running the webserver and some other stuff. Every page returned under 5 seconds, most under 2 seconds. We noticed zero improvement when we split the database onto its own server-class machine. In other words, the number and quality of servers make very little difference if the application is crap and may do little to improve performance for a well-written application.

    As for performance reasons to split your stuff - do it only when your single machine is IO-bound.


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