[Zope] Server specs.

[Alexander Staubo]

[snip]
> > Python is a real CPU sponge, and for this kind of load I'd 
> definitely
> > bump the horsepower up to a dual Pentium III Xeon 500MHz, 512KB L2
> > cache. Around $1100 per CPU. That said, however, I don't 
> know how well
> > Linux scales to two CPUs; for web serving, recent benchmarks have
> > pointed out that it doesn't scale well at all.
> 
> Cough, cough. Are you referring to the Mindcraft benchmarks? 
> They didn't
> cover *dynamic* websites at all, I think, and definitely they didn't
> benchmark Zope. Also for static pages, Linux scales well 
> enough to drown
> most network connections anyway.

Secondarily Mindcraft (the second round), primarily a recent ZDNet
benchmark published in, iirc, PC Magazine. So it was testing Stronghold
-- the commercial distribution of Apache -- but in the end, NT proved to
scale a lot better.

Linux is a great server OS (except on API level and wrt kernel services,
imho, but that's just me), but it does not scale very well *just* yet.
 
[snip]
>But
> indeed RAM is the biggest bottleneck of these all.

Not necessarily. RAM is significant for large databases requiring fast
response times. A good rule of thumb (if you're in an "enterprise", to
wit) is to have as much RAM as the size of database. Disk swapping is
the enemy of database performance.

> > Multiple-port or multiple network cards. Multiport NICs support port
> > failover and typically come with load balancing. Coupled with one or
> > more switches, these are real killers when it comes to bandwidth and
> > responsiveness.
> 
> This sounds like way overkill. 

2000 networked PCs and one server. Unless your users just spend all day
surfing the net, you have a saturated segment right there. Where's the
overkill?

>I'm no hardware guy, but to 
> support this
> you'd need a couple of fulltime engineers and some OS extensions, I'd
> think. :)

Why? I thought Linux had multiport NIC support in the box.
 
> Perhaps the best option is to try it out on a reasonable system first.
> If it gets too slow later (usage first has to pick up a lot, too,
> internally, this takes time), you can always upgrade the RAM, 
> or switch
> to a more powerful system. Prices of these systems will have come down
> too in the mean time. All in all you might end up spending less money
> going this route than buying a possibly overpowered system now.

Wise words, but another good rule is: "Don't underspend". Match your
investment with your requirements, and research carefully.

>Regards,
>
>Martijn

-- 
Alexander Staubo             http://www.mop.no/~alex/
"QED?" said Russell.
"It's Latin," said Morgan. "It means, 'So there you bastard'."
--Robert Rankin, _Nostramadus Ate My Hamster_