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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.mira.net.au!inquo!in-news.erinet.com!ddsw1!news.mcs.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.mathworks.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!warwick!bham!B.A.McCauley From: B.A.McCauley@bham.ac.uk Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.misc Subject: Re: How many hits a second on a unix server? Date: 20 Sep 1996 10:40:09 GMT Organization: The University of Birmingham, UK. Lines: 23 Message-ID: <B.A.MCCAULEY.96Sep20114009@wcl-l.bham.ac.uk> References: <323ED0BD.222CA97F@pobox.com> <51nn4m$gn3@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> <51si5a$79o@magic.metawire.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: wcl-l.bham.ac.uk To: merlin@magic.metawire.com (Marc MERLIN) In-reply-to: merlin@magic.metawire.com's message of 19 Sep 1996 15:40:42 -0700 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:130465 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:27642 comp.infosystems.www.misc:43869 In article <51si5a$79o@magic.metawire.com> merlin@magic.metawire.com (Marc MERLIN) writes: >>this is asinine. show me NT on an 8M p5/100 serving 300 hits/second. >>that's not even hard with Linux. > >300 hits/s = 25,920,000 hits/day, more than Netscape, and they distribute >the load on many servers, and DNS rotation. > >Keep in mind that each hit takes several seconds to serve, and that with an >average of 5sec/hit (understatement when you look at most web pages), you >would need about 1500 Web servers in Memory (and of course about 400 Megs of >memory to fit all these in memory if your unix flavor could handle that many >processes). > >Handling more than a few hits a second is already a lot. This is of course the big problem with sizing a Web server. The nearer you clients the more you can take. I would like, however, to contest the estimate that 1500 web server processes would take 400Mb of memory - remember fork() doesn't actually copy any memory if just marks it for copy-on-write. Incidently there are non-forking HTTP servers for Unix although I've never used one.