I did some searching and no solid results so I had to ask. Any chance the specs on the cluster can be given? Even a general range would be nice. I am trying to gauge what type of hardware I might need to handle a forum the size of DP. I have one that's now just as active but it's 1/10the the database size probably. There must be multiple servers but curious if we can get some details on the setup.
1. That's very old and not dated properly. 2. I doubt it's accurate. 3. Pretty sure I could run this site on a small farm of about 5-10 servers.
And you know this for fact? Curious since your reg date is 2007. $80k in hardware is a complete waste. You can buy Dell Blade servers for so much less. Even at the time 160GB was overkill and he spent $22k.
Same blade servers are currently being used... In a minimal setup that was only running the forum, it could be run on one (well tuned) web server and one database server. But we run a lot of other stuff besides just the forum. That being said, I wish the DB servers has more memory... and a future upgrade might be new DB servers, then convert all the existing DB servers to web servers. Can never have too much memory for DB servers... there are some really nice Sun blade servers that have 256GB RAM per blade... yum.
Great post. So what's the most resource intense part of DP? Is it the COOP requiring all these servers? Because as you say the forums could potential run off 2 servers. Although I think 4-5 would be best as you should do image serving on it's own server imho. One low end server running nginx or lighttpd can handle that load easy. Then you get a beefy DB server with 32gb ram. The database here is probably about 12gb. So 32gb should be plenty. Then maybe 2 httpd servers with a load balancer/firewall.
There's really nothing one thing that is a major resource hog compared to everything else. The keyword tracker tool is pretty big... about a billion DB records in that one alone.
Wow that's enormous DB. Do you feel that proportionaly your expenditures match your resources? Example is if the forum ad income is 80% of your income but the tools make up 20% income. Yet the tools might require 80% of your resources. I've always been curious how profitable your front-end has been in comparison to the forums. I am sure when you started the tools were important but do you think they are so now?
I dunno... considering all the tools are free, and the forum has premium memberships, it brings in more income. But at the same time, the forum would have never existed because it was started as a support forum for the tools. The tools are pretty popular now, but I suspect they will be even more so in the next few months. But nothing I do is driven by resource/income ratios or anything else like that. I do what I enjoy... the rest is just a bonus, so...
These are are the Sun blades I was talking about that I would love to have as DB servers... http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/blades/030727.htm 24 CPU cores (4 x 6 core per), 32 DIMM slots for up to 256GB RAM, etc.