Red Hat, Speed, and a Web server (fwd)

[jrv at vanzandt.mv.com (James R. Van Zandt)]

Jesse Noller <jnoller at allaire.com> writes:
>I have to build the fastest Linux web server I humanly can.

  I guess the first thing I would set up is enough diagnostics to tell
  what the bottleneck is.  /proc/loadavg tells part of the story.  Maybe
  /proc/stat and /proc/net/netstat too.  Not sure how to interpret
  those.  Anything else?
  
  I suppose the communications hardware is likely to be the bottleneck
  for a system serving a WAN.  If you're on a LAN, you can install one
  or more fiber optic NICs, I suppose.
  
  Failing that, I expect disk to be the next bottleneck.  UW SCSI with
  enough disks to fill the available bandwidth, in RAID 0 or RAID 5
  configuration.  If forced to use IDE disks, at least put only one on
  each bus, and try enabling DMA.  Mount the disks read-only.  (Well,
  you didn't say what the job was :-)
  
  In the unlikely event that the processor turns out to be the
  bottleneck (fractal image compression on the fly? :-) then use an SMP
  motherboard.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure what the point is.  After Microsoft
trumpeted their benchmark results, somebody pointed out that a quite
modest machine can fill up a T1 line.  If communications is not the
limit, then for their job (serving up fixed pages) the simple solution
is to replicate the database on as many machines as needed to
satisfy the demand.  Maybe you can give us enough more information to
clarify why this is a one-processor job.

	    - Jim Van Zandt
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