[3.x] Hosting options for fairly large forum - what hardware will I need?

[kotperski]

Hi!

I'm planning to move my forum to another hosting site. The problem is that I'm not sure what hardware configuration will I need and which general hosting options would be suitable.

My forum stats are following:

- over one million visits per month (average rate is 30-40k per day)

- about 400-600 active users during every "last 10 minutes" period

- number of active users during last 10 minutes sometimes peaks to 2000-4000 but for short periods.

- daily bandwidth rate is ca. 10GB

My current hosting option: two VPSes, one for serving board files and one for database. Both machines have (reportedly) Core i5 CPU and 1GB of RAM. Performance is generally OK, plenty of free RAM, CPU usage did never exceed 10%, I didn't notice any slowdowns.

I'm currently considering some options like:

- setting two VPSes, similar to those above. It proved to work, but I need to change my provider.

- setting one dedicated server, put both board files and database to one (what hardware configuration will be able to handle such setup? Intel E5700 with 4GB RAM will be OK? Any advices and experience sharing are welcome here).

- setting two dedicated servers, maybe of lower performance.For example two Intel Atom's D410, 4GB RAM or two Sun UltraSparcs III 1.5GHz, 4GB of RAM

I will choose hosting company by myself, I just need to estimate hardware required. I can handle all administration tasks and all operating systems, so this is not a problem (I'm planning to use FreeBSD as a database server and Gentoo as file server or Debian/kFreeBSD for single server, but not sure yet).

May I kindly ask for some advices for choosing new offer? Any help based on real experience with boards of similar size will be very appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[Rhett]

A little more info would be needed on what apps you are running and what add ons etc... performance varies greatly depending on those items, and also your budget would also come into play. You could build several systems in a wide range that would work, however depending on your budget and how much overhead you want to allow for growth and peaks would determine your needs.

[Grumpy]

- setting two dedicated servers, maybe of lower performance.For example two Intel Atom's D410, 4GB RAM or two Sun UltraSparcs III 1.5GHz, 4GB of RAM

NO!

Atom is faeces.

UltraSparcs is ultra faeces. Heck, just the fact that someone might even try to sell this to someone today makes me want to punch them.

[kotperski]

Thanks guys for your interest and answers!

A little more info would be needed on what apps you are running and what add ons etc... performance varies greatly depending on those items, and also your budget would also come into play. You could build several systems in a wide range that would work, however depending on your budget and how much overhead you want to allow for growth and peaks would determine your needs.

You are right, no doubts about it. My forum is 3.1 (upgrade to latest version is planned in future but not now yet), with following applications and addons/hooks:

- apps:IP.Shoutbox, Awards, (SOS30) Reputation Points, Unreal Portal, Custom Sidebar Blocks, Calendar, Tutorials are in use, there are IP.Chat and Blog installed but deactivated,

- hooks: Google Site Search, Privacy - Cookie Bar, (SOS31) TOP 20 Popular Post, Number of Topics Started, Tutorials: Topic View Article Count, Tutorials: Mobile Skin Application Link, Tutorials: Tutorialize a Post, Ad Code Sidebar, Unread Notifications, (PIN) Awards Pro - Topic View Template Skin Overloader, (T30) Show Reputation in Topic View, (DP30) News on Board, (e$30) Custom Sidebar Blocks, Recent Topics, Blank Sidebar, Tutorials: Recently Added Articles, (DP30) Top Reputation, Board Index Watched Content, (SOS30) TOP 20 Reputation v1.0.0, (SOS30) Members Age in Profiles v1.0.0, (IM) Group Name Indicator, (PIN) Awards Pro - Profile Modern Skin Overloader, (SOS30) Reputation per Forum, IP.Shoutbox (Global), (DP30) Forum Icons

That's all I think.

About future growth.. well, I do not think that it would become much bigger. Maybe 10-20% per year but this is very optimistic forecast.

I would like not to discuss about budget and pricing. I will consider this factor when choosing right option, so please skip this part.

NO!

Atom is faeces.

UltraSparcs is ultra faeces. Heck, just the fact that someone might even try to sell this to someone today makes me want to punch them.

I'm aware of rather poor performance of these CPUs but to be honest - I'm not sure if I really require high computing power. I didn't notice any important CPU usage so far, so I guess that much more important factor than CPU power would be I/O subsystem performance.

Of course I'm not sure about this statement, that's why I ask for advices :smile:

[Rhett]

Based on what you have noted here is what I would recommend

Dual Xeon 55xx or better

Raid 1 7200 RPM drives, you will see some slowness with this at your peaks, if you want to eliminate that, go to Raid 10 7200, or Raid 1 15k SAS.

8GB Ram

If you went with the raid 10 or 15k sas, you will be able to handle your peaks, and have much room for growth as well as the power needed to run your add ons and extra hooks.

As mentioned you could do this with raid 1, however at your peaks your wait i/o will be suffering. under your normal users however things would be just fine, that is a large gap from 500 to 4000k...

[wimg]

I'd like to thank you Rhett. This is a good indication for our board too, as I know at least that our current server should be able to handle the load we normally get.

Warm regards, Wim

[kotperski]

Thank you very much Rhett - your advice is now very good basis for me what to look while selecting hosting offers.

Thanks a lot!

[Grumpy]

Interesting swear filter... Not sure the replacement is better than what I wrote. xD

For the purpose of explaining of why you don't go atom/old hardware is this:

Atom - atoms are really really low in performance. And to say by comparison... something like core i5-2500 is roughly 20x better performing than d410 by my personal estimate on average of various benchmarks. And in reality, you should expect similar too. So, if you had 20x atoms, will it be as good? It's still no, because there's now increased overhead of systems talking to each other. The moment you get 2 atoms in (v)lan, the cost already begins to match or surpass a single non-atom. So, there's just never a good scenario where you put an atom in a multi-setup.

Old hardware - This is something you always want to avoid. Aged hardware has a higher likelihood of failure. Something like ultrasparc 3, released in 2004 at latest is now a decade old. Just the fact that it's still alive is a miracle. It's best to not to stretch this miracle any further. Some high priority setups will rotate hardware every few years just to reduce this problem. You know if you buy a 10 year old car, it's going to have a lot of breakdowns. Servers are unfortunately the same.