# Suggested best use of new hardware **URL:** \ **Category:** Deployment\ **Created:** [January 29, 2007, 6:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785 "2007-01-29T18:24:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 6:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/1 "2007-01-29T18:24:38Z")
HI all. I’m in a currently all Microsoft house but we are redesigning our current website in Rails complete with ecommerce. We currently get about 25,000 page views and this site will almost be entirely DB driven (though I plan to use some caching whenever possible). Now for the hardware: I have two Dell Poweredge 1950’s with dual dual-core processors, U320 SCSI drives and 16gb of ram that I will put behind a hardware load balancer for serving this Rails site. I also have another Dell Poweredge 2950 with dual dual-core processors, U320 SCSI RAID-5 drives and 16gb of ram that I will use for running the MySQL DB on. These are obviously performance powerhouses but I’m a Rails/MySQL newbie and a Linux idiot. I have a 100% successful development server already up and running on Windows 2003 Server with Apache 2.x ( I think it’s 2.3 but it escapes me now) with mod\_proxy\_balancer, a 5 instance Mongrel cluster and a MySQL instance on it so I know it’s possible in Windows if I pony up for the $2000+ Windows Server Enterprise licenses for all 3 machines but if I’ll get better performance out of Linux and a cast savings then?? My question. Can anyone suggest what I should consider in order to maximaize the use of this great hardware? I can’t find any real definitive RAM specs for linux online but like I said, I know nothing about Linux anyway so I might not even be looking in the right place. Thanks for any assistance! ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 6:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/2 "2007-01-29T18:50:50Z")
Expect to have a few issues getting the RAID on the 1950 and 2950 to work with Linux. There are a few fixes out there, but most distros currently have issues working with the RAID controller in both of those PowerEdge models. It will work, but takes a little extra effort. > **[Ubuntu Forums](https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?s=6def98421b0dca2ecde3fb47d2080e34&t=226114)** > > A help and support forum for Ubuntu Linux. Michael B. On 1/29/07, roller8 [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Enterprise licenses for all 3 machines but if I’ll get better > > > – Michael Biven removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid > **[Michael Biven — I build and run infrastructure.](https://biven.org/)** > > I build and run infrastructure. ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 6:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/3 "2007-01-29T18:55:53Z")
2950 worked perfect for me using CentOS 4.4 (4.3 didn’t recognized controller). Also the Megamon utils (was a megaraid SAS controller) worked flawlessly. ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 6:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/4 "2007-01-29T18:58:55Z")
Thanks for the advice! Someone else just noted that FreeBSD might be the way to go as well. Any opinions or experience with this OS? ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/5 "2007-01-29T19:22:03Z")
On Mon, Jan 29, 2007 at 09:58:22AM -0800, roller8 wrote: > Thanks for the advice! Someone else just noted that FreeBSD might be > the way to go as well. Any opinions or experience with this OS? I’m using FreeBSD exclusively for the servers I manage (a mixture of legacy PHP and Rails these days). I’ve had issues with the raid controller of the 2950 dropping disks from a raid 5 for no apparent reason. There have been some fixes to the driver in 6.2 but I haven’t gotten those tested yet, so I can’t say if the fix the problem. Also there is AFAIK no management utils for FreeBSD as of now. I’ve heard rumors that the old utilities for the old megaraid might work, but nothing confirmed. Despite of this I still prefer FreeBSD due to the superior package management system, the documentation and the overall coherent feel of the system. To me FreeBSD seems more mature than most Linux distributions I’ve tried. But this is just personal opinions, I’m sure many Linux users will be equally happy with their systems. Also Linux often have better support for new hardware if that’s an issue. Though for servers I suppose it rarely is. – Cheers, - Jacob A. ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/6 "2007-01-29T19:35:11Z")
Well, that’s two mentions for CentOS so that warrants a closer investigation. Thanks for the assistance since I haven’t even seen a running Linux box in my life. I guess I’ve just been Microsoft and Apple sheltered! As for the MySQL database and how much memory to assign it for cache, well, it will be all by itself on this 16gb ram 2950 server so I guess I can give it like 12 or 14 gigs of ram without even worrying about it, wouldn’t you agree? ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/7 "2007-01-29T19:25:04Z")
> Thanks for the advice! Someone else just noted that FreeBSD might be > the way to go as well. Any opinions or experience with this OS? FreeBSD is great, but then I might be biased as it’s what I use most often. At work we run CentOS and while I don’t really like the way it’s setup, (i’m used to freebsd 🙂 it works great too. THe hardware you have below will easily handle 25K page views a day… that’s really only about 1 every 4 seconds… About the only decision you have to make is how many gigs you want to give mysql for it’s cache… the rest should take care of itself… 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/8 "2007-01-29T19:39:12Z")
Well, that’s two mentions for CentOS so that warrants a closer investigation. Thanks for the assistance since I haven’t even seen a running Linux box in my life. I guess I’ve just been Microsoft and Apple sheltered! As for the MySQL database and how much memory to assign it for cache, well, it will be all by itself on this 16gb ram 2950 server so I guess I can give it like 12 or 14 gigs of ram without even worrying about it, wouldn’t you agree? ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/9 "2007-01-29T19:57:14Z")
> Well, that’s two mentions for CentOS so that warrants a closer > investigation. Thanks for the assistance since I haven’t even seen a > running Linux box in my life. I guess I’ve just been Microsoft and > Apple sheltered! If you do go with CentOS, you’ll probably end up using yum to manage packages… in which case you’ll want to set things up to use rpmforge as CentOS’s own repositories don’t have everything (such as nagios)… [http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories/RPMForge](http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories/RPMForge) That’s the one thing I love about FreeBSD… it’s port system is really really good… > As for the MySQL database and how much memory to assign it for cache, > well, it will be all by itself on this 16gb ram 2950 server so I guess > I can give it like 12 or 14 gigs of ram without even worrying about > it, wouldn’t you agree? Well how big is your dataset? And there’s the issue of how much mysql can use (that 4gb per process boundary, etc… not sure that applies here though)… The other thing I’d do is you’ve only got the two boxes is set them up as slaves to each other so in the event that either crashes you can run off just one for awhile… ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2007, 11:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/10 "2007-01-30T11:44:47Z")
On 1/29/07, roller8 [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > I also have another Dell Poweredge 2950 with dual dual-core > processors, U320 SCSI RAID-5 drives and 16gb of ram that I will use > for running the MySQL DB on. I’ll throw a twist into this for you. 🙂 Since it looks like you’ll be learning quite a bit anyway…I’d recommend installing a Xen kernel rather than a plain Linux kernel. I’d then set up 3 virtual machines on each “little” machine, one for Apache 2.2.4 or Nginx 0.5.5 (or whatever is currently, it moves very quickly!), one for mongrels, and one for MySQL replicas. I’d set up 1 virtual machine on the monster, for MySQL. Then I’d duplicate all of the above for a staging environment. 🙂 14 virtual machines, living on 3 physical machines, and room to grow. You can create VM sandboxes to test out updates and try scary sysadmin tasks, with zero fear of damaging your critical environments. Once you go Xen, you _never_ go back. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 8:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/11 "2007-01-29T20:10:17Z")
Thanks Phillip. Well I’ll have two 1950’s running behind a hardware load balancer along with each server having mirrored drives and redundant power so I hope that’s enough failover outside of having to restore a system from backup. The MySql server is just a single server however, with mirrored boot drives and the MySQL data living on a Raid5 with redundant power. I could pull a less powerful box to set up as a secondary database server to use in event of failure but I don’t know the ins/outs or keeping the data replicated with MySQL (I’m a SQL Server guy too) or clustering/balancing Linux/Unix boxes. I guess I certainly have to do some more research on all this. But I appreciate knowing whether or not these things are possible so I don’t spend hours scouring the web for info that doesn’t exist. 🙂 ----- Original Message ----- From: “Philip H.” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) To: “Deploying Rails” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) Sent: Monday, January 29, 2007 11:06 AM Subject: [Rails-deploy] Re: Suggested best use of new hardware ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2007, 3:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/12 "2007-01-31T15:16:23Z")
Raul, As I understand this setup is not about performance, using Xen won’t give you more. it is a strategy to make it easier to separate those componentes in different boxes later. I have read a lot about nginx performace, and actually the people of litespeed had to agree it does great: > **[My Rails Benchmark Results: LSWS + LSAPI vs nginx + FCGI ⋆ LiteSpeed Blog](https://blog.litespeedtech.com/2006/08/31/my-rails-benchmark-results-lsws-lsapi-vs-nginx-fcgi/)** > > After reading (http://blog.kovyrin.net/2006/08/28/ruby-performance-results/), I am pretty surprised that LSWS + LSAPI falls behind. The best performer in – Anibal Rojas > **[RUBYCORNER.COM](https://www.rubycorner.com/)** > > RUBYCORNER.COM - Contact us for any business inquiries [http://www.hasmanuydevelopers.com](http://www.hasmanuydevelopers.com) ---
**Author:** ![roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e47774/32.png) [@roller8](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/roller8)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2007, 6:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suggested-best-use-of-new-hardware/83785/13 "2007-01-30T18:41:28Z")
Wow! I was wondering about the “virtuability” of Linux boxes and I had read that benchmark blog about Nginx being the fastest to date. I’ll look into Xen and see what it’s about. Now you’ve really piqued my interest! Thanks! ----- Original Message ----- From: “Tom M.” [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) To: [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 2:44 AM Subject: [Rails-deploy] Re: Suggested best use of new hardware