[nmglug] Production server question

[Brendan]

Andres Paglayan wrote:
> excellent and very useful report Nick, much appreciated,
> I'd say that budget is probably on the $3-4ks,
> that fail-over is important,
> (probably lesser hardware performing as backup and mirror DB would do)
> the bottle neck would probably be on MySQL,

Three suggestions for decent servers on the cheap:
dealsea.com and xpbargains.com for links to cheap Dell servers (This is 
what I often use when I need a low-end virtualised server- some quad 
core cpu with 8GB of RAM, usually buying the memory from crucial.com).

www.serversdirect.com for other servers.  Gotta love the 9U rackmount 
with 50 hot swap SATA2 slots for $4k.

> some complex dashboard pages need to run about 50+ queries before they 
> are served,
> so focusing on HD i/o speed might be crucial,

Do you have any hard numbers for the existing implementation?  Install 
the sysstat package and look at what iostat can tell you.  Don't take a 
shot in the dark- get real requirements- disk IO/RAM/uptime and let us 
know.  You'll get better advice that way (not that you'll need it since 
you'll have all the facts already :-)

> I've been super happy with linux soft raid, I don't see why not using it,
> and every time i had to use some

Software RAID is the way to go.  RAID cards are only a good idea if you 
have more IO than spare CPU.  An expensive RAID card is a single point 
of failure- software RAID on one PC is the same as software RAID on 
another- fry your controller card and a commodity part can take its 
place.  Fry your RAID card and you better pray they're still making them.

-Brendan