Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote:
On Oct 3, 2005, at 11:14 PM, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
Can you tell us what kind of hardware is supporting that 100k?
Our main production platform is three servers: a database server, a web
server, and a media server. They're all Dual Xeons with 2G of RAM.
We've got a secondary server setup that's a single dual Xeon server
that we serve a bunch of miscellaneous smaller sites from.
In general, Django sites are happiest with lots of RAM. If your
database server has enough RAM it can cache nearly the entire database
in memory, which makes things much happier. Similarly, if Apache
doesn't have to swap, it's much faster. I've seen very little
difference in performance between different processors -- although I
wish we'd know about the performance issues with Postgres on Xeons
before we bought new hardware -- and other factors like disk speed and
L1 cache size also aren't nearly as important to Django environments as
RAM is.
Jacob (who loves to talk about hardware :)
Thanks for the reply. (and also to Jeremy)
That's good news. I've only got one server to start and its a dual
Opteron with 4gb ram and 6 disk SATA RAID. So I feel reasonable about
that. As things develop I can add servers and spread the responsibilities.
I was hoping for a little more clarification. I was on a mailing list
for a Java web app server several years ago. They were touting the
performance. One of their "spotlight" websites was said to get 1 million
hits a day. They were able to handle that load with only 7 Sun
enterprise servers and 2 Sun workstations. And they were quite happy.
Ugh! I unsubscribed immediately. (I didn't like Java anyway. :)
What you describe is an affordable and capable setup.
Thanks again.
Jimmie
