Boston Linux Installfest IX Saturday, March 3, 2001

[John Abreau]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Patrick McManus wrote:

> [Jerry Feldman: Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 06:41:48PM -0500]
> 
> > welcome. Please consider contributing $25 per machine. We are also looking 
> > to purchase a new server for the BLU.  
> 
> neat. Which brings to mind a chance for a practical linux server scaling
> question: 
> 
>   What type of hardware is tarnhelm today?
>   How much work does it do? (how big are the mailing lists.. how many
>     messages a day.. how many web transactions.. are they all
>     static-apache-things?)
>   how close to being maxed out is it? (and how do you measure that?)
> 
>   are you considering adding new server based member services? (blu.org forwarding
>     accounts and/or pop service? DNS services?)

Tarnhelm is currently a P133 with 64mb of memory. I regularly ssh into it
from work to check my email, and my session frequently freezes, sometimes
for a few seconds at a time, sometimes for up to a minute or so. It
*always* freezes like this when I send a message during the day, which
indicates to me that the machine is overloaded. The machine uses SCSI
disks; there are no IDE hard drives in it, and we don't keep anything in
the cdrom drive.

There have been many things I wanted to deploy on blu.org the past few
years that the machine simply wouldn't have been able to support. Tarnhelm
is the master DNS server for blu.org, but we kept it out of the WHOIS
records because I feel it would be unable to handle the extra load
gracefully.

--
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
ICQ#28611923 / AIM abreauj / Email jabr at blu.org

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