[Discuss] I think my server is running out of "something"

[David Kramer]

On 03/18/2012 12:45 AM, John Abreau wrote:
> Is it completely impossible to deploy multiple servers instead of trying
> to mash everything together onto a single machine?
> 
> In my home network, I have a CentOS server that just does firewall/DNS/
> DHCP, a second server for web/mail/fileserver, and a third server for backups.
> That's in addition to my desktops, laptops, and tablet.
> 
> I'm not running MythTV, but if I were to deploy MythTV, I'd use a dedicated
> server that would do nothing but MythTV.

Of course it's possible to do so.  But up until a few hours ago, it was
working completely fine, rarely going below 85% idle, and burning about
140 watts according to my Killowat.  That's pretty damn awesome.  Two
servers would mean almost twice the electricity draw with no real
benefit.  Oh, and the server has an IR tranceiver on it for changing
channels on my cable box.

The MythTV capture card (PVR-350) does hardware MPEG encryption, so
MythTV isn't really dragging things down as much as you would think
processor-wise, though I'm sure it pounds the sata bus, though.  I only
have one card and it's SD, so it's not like I'm trying to write out
multiple HD files at the same time.  All the MythTV recordings go on
drives not used for anything else.

Postfix sees a lot of mail (I usually get around 200 spam messages a
day, most of which is caught by SpamAssassin).  The web server is
hosting about 6 domains, some of which go to one of the two wiki engines
I have on my server, but maybe it handles 100 hits a day.

So why do I need multiple servers if my CPU cores are mostly idle?