[nflug] Server Specs - Need Some Comments

[David J. Andruczyk]

--- Frank Kumro <fkumro at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am working on a new contract and one priority is to set up a LAMP
> server. I have set up many before however this one will have 500,000
> records that are searchable in the MySQL database. Since I have never
> worked with this much data I was wondering if the LUG can give me
> some
> specs for the server. PHP4 will be used for searching unless the
> performance is horrible, but I will deal with that when I begin
> testing. What I was thinking for hardware is
> 1) SCSI drives
> 2) 2GB of ram (maybe more maybe less??)
> 3) 2 processors (Xeon, is 1 good enough?)
> 
> As you can see I only have a vague idea. Thanks in advance guys!
> --

It depends  largely on what you mean by "500,000 records".  I setup a
few years back an eventlog parser for win2K systems hosted on a P4
1.5Ghz box wiht 256 megs of ram.  After a few weeks the system had
several million records in there and it was all searchable via a
php/apache frontend.  The database was very simplistic (and not well
optimized) but it ran fine for what it had to do..

For your situation, you need to clarify how complex your database it, 
it's approximate size (not just in records, but in storage needs). 
half a million records, could mean just a big list of names or it could
be the mp3's of half a million artists.  You didn't specifiy and thus I
can't give a good recommendation..

But for a typical server I'd say a minimum of 1GB of ram (more if the
DB is larger).  Xeon isn't necessarily required (big money for those), 
But a dual proc machine can tend to improve performance (esp for DB's),
 I'm more partial for a dual athlon or athlon64, as the price to
performance ratio tends to be higher than most intel boxes. If the data
is any sort of mission critical I'd have the disks be either RAID1 (if
there's not a whole lot, i.e. under 70 GB ) or RAID5 for larger arrays
(greater than 70GB).  SCSI is the tried and true performer,  but if you
wanted to be slightly cheap, you could go with a HARDWARE SATA raid
setup (3Ware 9500 series controllers)  SATA limits you somewaht in
terms of maximum numbers of disks, but SATA disk sizes are larger than
the largest SCSI drives and typically 1/2 to 1/4 the cost. (if you
decide on SATA go with 3Gb with NCQ (native command queuing) on both
the disks and raid controller.

You really should work out how much this box is going to be hammered on
and if it looks like it'll need to support expansion or greater loads
in the future. I'd also try to asses how mission critical it is as it
determines how far you should go with regards to disk, PSU redundancy,
cpu horsepower, etc..



Dave J. Andruczyk

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