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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!news.sgi.com!enews.sgi.com!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.webspan.net!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.misc Subject: Re: Unix too slow for a Web server? Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 14:38:07 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 37 Message-ID: <3249A63F.167EB0E7@FreeBSD.org> References: <323ED0BD.222CA97F@pobox.com> <3246D415.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org> <Pine.BSF.3.91.960923200853.12260C-100000@dyslexic.phoenix.net> <Dy91KF.IMA@interactive.net> <52am8g$fvs@nntp1.u.washington.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) To: Trent Piepho <xyzzy@u.washington.edu> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:131677 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:28000 comp.infosystems.www.misc:44103 Trent Piepho wrote: > > But how would you share the data between them? Unless you buy a RAID array > for each machine, you'll have to use NFS or something. If you factor in > 20 gigs of drive for each ppro, you'll have a hard time buying 10. Why would you have to? For every n-hundred customers you add, you stick in a new machine and set up their virtual host entries to point to it. If you want a central page for all customers, you just make one of your web servers a transit point for all the links to the specific machine assigned to the customer. Some ISPs have tried to create the concept of "one big machine" by aggressive use of NFS, and in practice I'm afraid that it just doesn't work very well. Either you have to implement a fairly intelligent round-robin login scheme which automatically assigns the least loaded machine in the cluster to an incoming user or the users behave as simple creatures of habit and all mob up on one or two machines - you can't stop them from doing this without additional administrative headache. Far easier to simply assign them a username, password and machine name when they join as customers, and that machine is then their "home machine." As a machine gets full, you simply add another. Needless to say, you should also back them up and have at least one hot-swappable spare standing by, so if a given machine croaks you simply yank it out of circuit and reassign its IP address to the hot spare once you've loaded the latest backup onto it. Don't be fooled by the "redundancy" afforded by an NFS cluster - even if the user can still log in on some other box in such a configuration, they're not going to be very happy users without their home directories or WEB pages anyway. There's really no way to eliminate the need for adequate spares, and eliminating NFS from the equation will vastly simplify your life in other areas. -- - Jordan Hubbard President, FreeBSD Project