[Zope-DB] Optimal System Design

[Aaron Fosdick]

Brian,

This is a very open ended question and the correct answer depends on a 
number of variables such as how much caching you want to do, the nature 
of the queries, are your SQL methods asking MySQL to do processing, and 
are you going to run Plone/CMS or just Zope, etc.. From my experience, I 
think you will find that this system will be light in RAM, but should be 
adequate to begin. However, if your budget allows, make the following 
changes.

Get 1GB RAM - it's cheap and the apps will take advantage of it.
Get 2CPUs, and make sure to get/build a good 2.6 SMP kernel. IMO - Zope 
consumes far more CPU than MySQL. Plus it's fun to watch the little CPU 
utilization bars in gkrellm.

Some other notes:
You *may* find that Fedora Core 2 supports the Dell better.
Be sure to benchmark with and without hyperthreading as it can slow you 
down in some cases.
In my experience partitions don't really make much difference. You can 
do whatever suits you - Software RAID 0 won't give you a boost on this 
class of system other than the comfort of knowing that a drive can fail 
and you'll be ok.
Dell's integrated controllers are nothing to write home about, and you 
won't see much performance improvement unless you move to a PERC card 
with 3+ drives.  The ideal configuration would be a PERC with 5 drives: 
4 in RAID 5, 1 as a hotspare.
Unless you absolutely need a feature, avoid beta software..  stick with 
stable versions (MySQL 4.0.21) for your production systems.  You can 
always put the bleeding edge stuff on your dev box.

Good luck,

--Aaron

brianc at temple.edu wrote:

>Was wondering if the people on this list could give me their 
>view on the optimal way to design a new system I'm 
>developing for zope/mysql.
>
>Dell PowerEdge 1600SC Tower Server
>Single 2.4 GHz Xeon Processor (possible upgrade to 4)
>2x256MB DDR SDRAM (4 slots, up to 4 GB)
>2x36GB SCSI 10K RPM, onboard controller.
>Integrated Gigabit NIC (Either Broadcom or Intel)
>
>I'm going to install Suse Linux 9.0 because of personal 
>preference. (Would 9.1 with the 2.6 Kernel be worth it?)
>
>The server will be running Zope 2.x, MySQL 4.x, Apache 2, 
>and a simple ftp server. The mysql table sizes will be 
>roughly a gig in size. The performance intensive tables will 
>be MyISAM.
>
>What is the optimal harddrive configuration to use? Software 
>RAID 0 the 2 disks together and then partition from there? 
>(data integrity is not an issue) Or make one a dedicated 
>data drive for mysql? And the other for ftp server file 
>space. 
>
>What is the best way to partition the file system out? 
>Possibly buying a cheap IDE drive to run the OS partitions 
>off of wouldn't be out of the question. 
>
>The intended traffic will probably be small at first, 
>however, as the datasets grow as well as popularity we could 
>foreseeably be adding more hardware. 
>
>This is the first system I'm developing ground up so any 
>advice would be greatly appreciated. 
>
>Thanks,
>Brian
>
>PS. For anyone interested the price tag on this system is 
>$1,097. 
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