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April 14th, 2009 by Frank C.
In most cases, ‘bigger’ has always been considered to be better. This has been obvious for years in the skyscraper wars and throughout the 60’s with the American auto manufacturers each out-doing one another with larger and larger displacement engines. In the computer world this translates to the ‘scale up’ or ‘scale out’ models of thinking. One can argue in either direction depending on the specific requirements of the project at hand.
Taking the “bigger is better” mentality into application configuration tends to be where things quickly fall apart. Without fully understanding what certain configuration values do and how a simple change in something like the MaxClients value in Apache will affect the number available connections to your MySQL database; a novice systems administrator can quickly bring even the biggest hardware to its knees. I see cases like this day-in and day-out in various configurations ranging from a Web server to NFS server. I’ll show a few specific examples of cases where bigger was clearly not better.
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Tags: apache settings, server configurations, systems architecture, website capacity
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April 2nd, 2009 by Rich H.
This is Part II of the article “Scaling Out Web Tiers.” Click here for Part I.
Now that you’ve selected a load balancer, it’s time to think about what type of servers will reside behind it.
There are two basic schools of thought when selecting Web servers for load balanced traffic: you can go “large” or you can go “wide.”
A typical example of going “large” would be two really beefy servers with redundant disks and power supplies, sky-high specs, and prices to match. This will handle a fairly large amount of load, and the redundancies in the hardware prevent a simple power supply or disk failure from halting your server.
The caveat with this configuration is that Web servers fail for a lot of reasons unrelated to hardware. A memory leak/bug in the custom code that drives your site, or the underlying software stack can bring even the most well-spec’d server to a grinding halt. Since you only have two Web servers, when one is down, you’ve lost 50% of your capacity. This could leave your visitors “standing in line” to view your site if the remaining server cannot handle the entire load.
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Tags: managed hosting, server configurations, web servers
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