I think my forum is quite big, and it wass running on one server till today. Now I have two servers online :).

Ya, those are nice numbers.. how can you run almost 4,000 users only in one box?
You are a hero. :)

I'm used to spread the server load through workers. Just curious, how high is the server load when you have 3,500 users online? Thanks for the info. I noticed your semi-automatic guns (10k drives and 12GB of RAM). Try if you can the new SAS 15K drives.

Load is 10-15 with 3000+ users online.. Today I setup a new woodcrest with 2x73GB 15K HDD's :), as MySQL server. Now I need some time for optimization and I beleive those servers could handle 5000 users online.

The thing that surprises me is the storage solutions I see some of you describing. I've always assumed that interaction with the hard drives would be the bottleneck. I spend a lot of money on really fast RAID systems. My current box has an Adaptec 3805 SATAII RAID card, with 8 Seagate 7,200RPM 750GB SATAII drives, in a RAID 10 configuration. The setup is fast as hell, with decent fault tolerance. This saved my butt a couple of days after I deployed this brand new box. A contractor at my data center arced something in the power box supplying my cabinet and spiked the box. One drive was taken out and the RAID card was damaged, but the system kept running after a restart (albeit with a fair amount of complaining) until I could get down and replace the damaged components. I have drives that big because they weren't much more than the smaller ones and because I am about to start offering image hosting.

What do you guys think is the bear minimum hard drive setup required to run a busy vB system, with both acceptable performance and fault tolerance? Also, what type of external storage is fast enough to use with a vB DB server? Eric

I would like to have HDD's and RAID like you, but have to take care about every dollar. My clients are crying for money ;).. and, if you are ready to spend some time with your server you really can save some money.

With 5,000 users, you need 6 servers. 2 for web, 2 for db and 2 for load balancing (1 is failsafe). Then your server load will be around 0.5-1.5. You cannot run an efficient board while having the load at 15. However, you will obtain much better results if you use a proxy array, instead of spending extra money on 2 cheap balancers.. Serving the data will be ultra fast.

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You should bump the drives to 15K SAS RAID10, especially for your db servers.
You are killing your servers with SATA, as we speak.

And instead of load balancer hardware, you should try nginx with few workers set in proxy.
It will blow your mind, speed wise.

This is a powerful server, but it was still built on a tight budget and the extra expense could not be justified. At any rate, the current setup is lightning fast and handling the load just fine. I'll check out nginx, but when I need load balancing again, I will probably use the system built into the Astaro firewall I use. Thanks for the tip though. Eric

Yeah, I am in the process of learning as much as I can about splitting the load on 2 servers, as I am ready to go with 2 servers myself. Any useful links on the web about this stuff would be handy. For now i'll just keep reading each and every thing I see about it ^^

Currently 1 server - 2,4GHz HT with 2GB RAM.

Just finished with moving my databases to a new server.. Now I have 3500 users online with 2-3 load on web server, 0.3 - 0-6 on mysql server :).. Forum.hr And didn't finished with optimisation yet, I will have lower values in a few days :D

What webserver are you using?
Litespeed is great and Ngix too.

Btw, That FORUM would make tons of money from adsense :D

I prefer Nginx. With the money I save from Litespeed Enterprise license, I put another grand on top and buy a very good server. :)

I use good old Apache 1.3 :)

We are having 5 web servers and 1 db for our board.
Our board generates about 20+M pageviews/mth with approx 1300 - 2500 users online (as reported by vB on a 900 secs timeout)

However, the access is pretty slow and recently our db load is very erratic. It can jump to 100!!!
Refer to http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1485653

Anyone can share with us on how to optimize our setup? Our servers are installed with off-the-box RHEL4. We do not have knowledge on how to custom build kernels or modules.

Apparently that way seems to be the most efficient to keep load down and serve out fast.
Anyone can share where to find such info.

For those who indicated 2 dbs, how is your setup like? How to have 2 dbs in 1 vB installation?

It's hard to say without deep into servers..

V6Performance Networks
Users: 23k+
Threads: 82k+
Posts: 1.2 million
http://www.big-boards.com/board/1015/

All on 1 server.

Users: 14k+
Threads: 40k+
Posts: 1.5m+

Server(s): 1

Specs:
- Xeon Quad Core 3220 @ 2.4ghz
- 2GB RAM
- 147GB SA-SCSI 15k RPM
- 250GB SATA II (backup)
- 2TB bandwidth.

http://photography-on-the.net/forum

Big-boards rank ca. 250 and going up.
Alexa rank ca. 12,500
2000-3000 users online 24/7
4,7 million posts
135,000 members

One server:
RHEL 5 64-bit
Sphinx search
Litespeed Enterprise Server 3
2 x Intel Xeon-Woodcrest 5148
8GB RAM
2x SAS-SCSI (15k rpm) + SATA + NAS

Server can handle much more than above needs, it's on light load now.

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Sorry but that is simply not true.

Load is essentially "processes in queue". 1*cores load means all works in about realtime. To interpret any loads higher than that is not that straighforward. What those processes are, are their queuing really slowing things down, how long do the queued processes need to execute etc?

Wow,

that is impressive.

Would you mind share us your config for Litespeed? i have a board with that much of member online but less post and thread. Running on Xeon 5335 with 4GB of ram and 73GB SCSI for both webserver and database.

But at peak it low down.

Thanks

I can see this. I can't believe the load difference since we switched to a SAN. I would think NAS would have the same functionality. It really seems to be all about the drives. I'm not about to try it but I bet I could get away with not having seperate front end servers.