[Zope] New server recommendations

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

I too, really like the Appro boxes (I'm using a a variety of them, 1124S,
1124i, 1224X).  Perhaps look at the Appro 1124i, 1U/DualAMD/cold-swap-ide).
This box may be marketed under different names by different resellers; they
are very reasonably priced for what you get.  They have excellent cooling,
and are well-built; they use a commodity Taiwanese Mainboard (Tyan Thunder
K7) in a somewhat-proprietary-but-designed-around-that-board chassis.  The
nice thing about this setup is you can buy boxed Tyan mainboards as
shelved-spares. The resellers of these boxes, though, are the ones who are
going to provide support, so keep that in mind.  Appro is essentially just a
manufacturer (though you can buy direct from them).

If you went the AMD route, I would strongly suggest against a DIY approach;
cooling is a serious issue.  Intel Xeon Prestonia boxes run very cool (we
have Appro 1224X boxes, and the exhaust is not even warm).  For an idea
about cooling on AMD servers, Appro's 1124 AMD servers have excellent
cooling, but the exhaust is decently warm; anything less than marvelous
cooling would likely fry your dual AMD box.

If you want to go the DIY approach, you can get all the components you would
need for building a box, but I would suggest going the P4-Xeon route, and
get a MB with good environment sensors drivers, and buy a case with the best
cooling you can find.

Bottom line: AthlonMP offers the best value proposition compared to Xeon,
but make sure your cooling is done right if you go this route.

We run Debian on all our boxes.  With our newest setup, we plan to run
multiple Zope ZEO client instances on each 2P/1U web-server box, tied to one
CPU each - each bound to an IP with a dedicated 100MB 3com on-board Ethernet
port that our front-end squid-cache proxy server(s) connects to.  We connect
on the back-end via switched Copper GB Ethernet to our 1U ZSS boxes (which
have on-board Intel Pro 1000 GB port and a hardware raid card in their
single PCI slot).

If you are running Linux, you may want to investigate CPU affinity patches
to the kernel to avoid the SMP penalty you might incur with a single Zope
instance wandering across CPUs.

Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: David Hart [mailto:dhart@atlantisblue.com.au]
Sent: Sunday, September 15, 2002 12:50 AM
To: zope@zope.org
Subject: Re: [Zope] New server recommendations


Hi Howard & All, 

I'm in a similar predicament, albeit not so urgent. 

I'm looking at APPRO (http://appro.com/) 1RU dual Athlon servers. (Available
from Emagen (http://emagen.com.au/) for purchases in Australia). 

My Zope installations typically use external processes like MySQL, HTMLDOC,
apache/ssl, sendmail, etc., so the second CPU is useful as overflow in
crunch situations. 

-- 
David Hart 
Atlantis Blue Pty Ltd 

On Sun, 2002-09-15 at 17:22, Howard Hansen wrote: 
[snip]

>From recent discussions, it appears that Zope doesn't benefit much from a
dual processor system, but it does benefit from higher clock rates and more
RAM.  So should I invest in a faster single-proc system with a couple of
gigs of RAM, or go with a slower dual-proc box?