Dedicated Server VS Cluster

reteep · 04-21-2006, 12:14 AM

I'm running a forum with an average of about 700 Online Users. In Prime Times it's 1000.

About 6 months ago I moved it from a dedicated Server of mine to a Cluster which doesn't belong to me. It's administrated by a company.

The Cluster Specs are Dual XEON, 4GB RAM, SCSCI RAID etc. and it's using Zeus instead of Apache.

However, in primetimes my board became slow lately. The company said the Cluster just can't take it anymore. They say my site does the most traffic and eats most HW and I'd need a hell machine if I'd like to move back on a dedicated Server (they don't offer dedis). I pay them 150 EURO per month, which is quite cheap for the power but they don't intend to upgrade that cluster which drives me into a blind alley.

My question is: How much Hardware is needed for a Board with 1000 concurrent Users(and still raising)? Or is it way too expensive to go for a single dedicated server with these kind of loads?

**ToddW** · 04-21-2006, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by reteep

I'm running a forum with an average of about 700 Online Users. In Prime Times it's 1000.

About 6 months ago I moved it from a dedicated Server of mine to a Cluster which doesn't belong to me. It's administrated by a company.

The Cluster Specs are Dual XEON, 4GB RAM, SCSCI RAID etc. and it's using Zeus instead of Apache.

However, in primetimes my board became slow lately. The company said the Cluster just can't take it anymore. They say my site does the most traffic and eats most HW and I'd need a hell machine if I'd like to move back on a dedicated Server (they don't offer dedis). I pay them 150 EURO per month, which is quite cheap for the power but they don't intend to upgrade that cluster which drives me into a blind alley.

My question is: How much Hardware is needed for a Board with 1000 concurrent Users(and still raising)? Or is it way too expensive to go for a single dedicated server with these kind of loads?

Guys I know with that many users on constantly have split the site into 2 servers. 1 for database the other for the rest. I believe both have 2gb ram and dual xeon SCSI servers.

Do you allow attachments?
Do you allow images to be viewed in the post or do they have to click to view the image tha twas attached?

THeres a # of ways to help reduce load with forums, re-optmizing the database, not showing every image in a post requiring them to click to view, making sure no one is hotlinking attachments, etc.

reteep · 04-22-2006, 03:50 AM

The cluster is like that. One Webserver(Zeus) and one seperate Database Server.. The DB Server is a XEON and the Webserver a DUAL XEON.. However, it doesn't seem to be able to handle the load.

I investigated a bit, most power is sucked by Search Queries. Unfortunately vB doesn't have an option to disallow searches when the load goes above e.g. 5. But it wouldn't work out anyway because the database machine is seperated from the webserver.. I already set the timeout between searches to 15 seconds / user, but with so much traffic every second a new search query is being shot.

It's really difficult to get rid of that, when I move away from that Cluster I need to use Apache again, which is even more hardware intensive, good for SEO but bad for performance. Zeus is bad for SEO but great for the performance, although it has its price.

What I gonna do now is restricting searches to registered members.. renting 2-3 dedicated Servers for the forum wouldn't make the outcome worth it..

**ToddW** · 04-23-2006, 06:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by reteep

The cluster is like that. One Webserver(Zeus) and one seperate Database Server.. The DB Server is a XEON and the Webserver a DUAL XEON.. However, it doesn't seem to be able to handle the load.

I investigated a bit, most power is sucked by Search Queries. Unfortunately vB doesn't have an option to disallow searches when the load goes above e.g. 5. But it wouldn't work out anyway because the database machine is seperated from the webserver.. I already set the timeout between searches to 15 seconds / user, but with so much traffic every second a new search query is being shot.

It's really difficult to get rid of that, when I move away from that Cluster I need to use Apache again, which is even more hardware intensive, good for SEO but bad for performance. Zeus is bad for SEO but great for the performance, although it has its price.

What I gonna do now is restricting searches to registered members.. renting 2-3 dedicated Servers for the forum wouldn't make the outcome worth it..

Make sure you get a mysql expert to optimzie your mysql conf. file, that REALLY REALLY helps.

Only members can search, you NEED to do this

Also set timeout to 30 seconds maybe.

Mrblogs · 04-24-2006, 03:18 AM

May i suggest using another database system instead of MySQL?, something perhaps a bit more optimised for large usage.

As for search queries, why not reduce them to 30 seconds?

perhaps it may be worthwhile offering a google search feature instead - which would be useful if google has spidered your site recently. It may not be as up to date, however it would indeed alleviate the strain from your servers.

si2040 · 04-24-2006, 09:52 AM

both are ok really depends on what you want to do with the setup and how robust you need it

reteep · 04-26-2006, 04:51 AM

I believe vBulletin only supports MySQL..

Turning of the Search for Guests improved the load pretty much "but" it also increased the daily registrations from 150 to 220

rwh · 04-27-2006, 05:30 AM

We have a client that runs between 1500 and 4000 on his forums. We have him in server for vb, db, and phpads, server is dual xeon 2.8 with 8 gig of ram, 2 73 scsi drives and running freebsd 6, it runs quiet well. Of course there is a cost to a server like this but he has no issues.

RWH

labrocca · 09-22-2006, 02:33 PM

Search in forums is something that can quickly kill a server. I suggest you also rebuild your search database but first ..in VB you can disallow search indexing for certain forums. Make sure to do that for anything not important. Also PRUNE...PRUNE PRUNE PRUNE...too often sites with over 500k posts feel the need to leave post around from the beginning. This is COSTLY. What good are posts from 2 years ago? You can also consider using Google site search instead of VB search.

I believe VB also allows you to split up your search database to a seperate server...do it.

Search is easily one of the top resource killers for any forums.

littleFella · 09-24-2006, 12:18 PM

The usual hardware bottlenects are HDD amd memory.
What kind of RAID are you running?

Still the biggest performance gains are achieved through database optimasation. That is probably too tough since you are using a db designed by someone else. But you may, at the very least, try to see if your MyISAM key buffer (key_buffer_size) and InnoDB's buffer pool (innodb_buffer_pool_size) are large enough. Otherwise there will be a ton of disk swapping.