40K per day is more than I'm seeing across all my sites combined. I'm going to have to have a look at how/what asrep actual does. I can't see how dumping a few entries into a database should add much load at all. 40K uniques even assuming 20% CTR is only 8000 new database entries per day. That shouldn't add too much load at all.
It depends on servers, your dual xeon should be able to handle it. I am already pushing over 1000 process at any time on my Celeron, there's simply no room for asrep.
I should maybe add that I run eaccelerator on my server (2,4GHz and 512MB ram) and it's 40000 pageviews per day, not uniques.
1000 processes running on a webserver ? I don't have any machines running anywhere near that sort of level. My celeron feeds dynamic content to about 5K uniques per day, I rarely if ever see more than 100 processes at anyone time. CPU usage tends to run well inexcess of 50% usage. There is no way on this earth that I'd want to run 1000 active processes on any grade of celeron - I seriously doubt that the processors could cope with that level. Is there any chance that the majority of those processes are sleeping ? I'd suggest that with 1000 active processes you'd be severely overloading a single celeron box. Any chance you could post the output of 'top' (well the first few lines), I'd really like to see that.
Did eaccelerator help with the performance? I've been meaning to install it but my servers are setup specifically to handle large amount of traffic, I don't want to mess up the configuration if it doesn't help that much.
Most of them are sleeping, currently 600+ httpd connections and 400+ mysqld connections. It peaked to 2100+ processes before, most sleeping.
eAccelerator usually helps, but it does depend on the code. I use it at work where we run pretty cpu intensive code on a cluster of webservers (currently 5x dual opteron) and it cuts our load in about half.
Wow, how many visitors can it support at any one time? You got some very nice hardware. Do you also setup seperate servers for MySQL?
We think we currently are at around 600.000-800.000 pageviews per day, it's the online part of a newspaper so our visits depends a lot on what kind of stories we're running and can peak very high when inportant events happen. We're running LinuxVirtualServer as a loadbalancer, and using MySQL in a master/slave setup on seperate servers.
I had no idea they could handle so much. Each of my Celerons can only handle about 20k pageviews a day.
It really depends on the application, each of our opterons can handle from 40 to +3000 page requests per second, depending on wether it's heavy php with lots of DB or just a flat text file.
I peaked a celeron at 1700+ httpd connections but the load was still under 2, always wondered how much I could push it, it was all static though.