How many servers is your big board on?
 

My two largest forums are on 2 servers each. What is your set up like and with how many servers?

Currently 1 server - 3GHz HT Xeon with 2GB RAM.

Not a Big-Board since we're still building, but call it a precautionary measure. We have a dedicated server which hosts one other small vB forum.

Specs:
P4 3.0 GHz
2MB Cache
64BIT HT 2GB of DDR 400 ram
Two 80GB Western Digital hard drives
Raid 1 (3ware Raid Card)
A 250GB Western Digital back up hard drive.

4x Web servers: Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 2 GB Ram, 2 X 80 GB with Raid 1
3x DB servers: Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 8 GB Ram, 3 X 73 GB SCSI U320 10K
1x db server: dual P4 for backups
RPM with Raid 5
2x Load balancers: Dual P4 3.0 ghz, 1gb Ram

Apache/Linux
PHP 4.4.1
MySQL 4.0.24

More than 5. :)

That?s kind of where we are at. We own several large forums and host them across a rather similar setup. I can tell you, the one DB server we have tried RAID10 on is doing great! Its a Dual Xeon EM64T 3.2Ghz with 4Gb RAM and 4 x 146Gb U320 15k RPM drives. We custom compiled our kernel on that server to enable the deadline IO scheduler and it has done wonders. IOwait dropped from 60% to around 9%.

-Mat

switched to duals earlier this year....

Web server:
Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz (single processor)
2 gig RAM
36g 10k SCSI primary drive
36g 10k SCSI backup drive

MySQL server:
Pentium III Xeon, 900MHz (quad processor)
2 gig RAM
four 18g 10k SCSIs (RAID-5)

Apache 2.0.40
PHP 4.4.2
MySQL 4.1.18-std

only 1 because I don't know how to have set up multi servers for a website..

last time i looked the server specs were on the line of dual 2.8 Xeons 2 gigs of ram. (Gua)

and my new boards are sharing a server with the game they are forums for which has a spec of dual 3gig Xeons with 3 gig of ram, if anything thou, it'll be the game that forces an upgrade to the server not the forums

One dedicated server for now--7200 members, 1.5million+ posts. We've hit as many as 970 users online and haven't had any performance issues, although a majority of the guest users were Yahoo Slurp at the time. Normal activity is now about 650 members/non-members online during peak hours, still no major issues.

I did get our server configured with 3.25G of memory, which has helped. Well, that and George (aka "eva2000") having helped configure my.cnf to keep it running efficiently. :) I have four tables as InnoDB, which really cleared up the table locking problems we've had. We're running a Celeron 2.8GHz right now, which isn't ideal, but it IS working well for us, and within our budget (fueled 100% by donations).

wow , mind sharing some of the my.cnf file? ive been getting deadlocks every few days it seems and i usually only have 50-60 members online at once. and the forum is the only major site on the server with heavy database usage.

either way, im running a P4 2.8 ghz w/ HT, 1024mb ram, 120 sata single drive and it runs smoothly, just get that deadlock once in a while for some reason.

Web
Dual Xeon 2.4 GhZ
4 GB RAM
2x 80 GB 7.2K IDE HD Non-Raid

DB
Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz
4 GB RAM
4x 36 GB SCSI HD RAID 10

Table Locks are fun ;)
Except that it seems to work fine, though I am a bit concerned about CPU load on the webserver which seems to be too high - 400+ Plugins might be too much.
When this starts to cause problems i might have to go back hacking the files.

Is there a performance gain on multiple servers vs. a large multi-processor box? For example are you really better off with two dual proc boxes vs. a quad proc box? I am starting to see quad boxes going for around 450US a month. In a few more years we'll probably have quad proc dual core boxes for under 400US a month so wouldn't that be more than enough for a huge board?

68 votes with 50% of them being only 1 server. Very interesting.

Everyone's concept of the "big board" is different.

I personally think the one server one of my boards is on isn't sufficient... Its getting rather sluggish

curious to which 4 tables you have as InnoDB....

Those that have multiple web servers, how are you spreading the load ? - simple round robin dns or some other method ?

We use a Cisco CSS to spread the load across our web servers. Initially we used round robin DNS but if we need to drop a single/group of sites from certain web servers we had to manually edit the zone files. We normally serve all of our sites from the full number of web servers except when we have a denial of service attack. We try to make the attack not affect other sites while we work on mitigating it.

LVS solution with 2 load balancers, 3 web machines and 1 strong mysql machine behind.

It doesn't really matter how many servers you have. I could have 20 servers, but they all could be using Pentium 2 processors...

This is true... it's more meaningful if you include how much traffic you handle. I'm pushing 2200-2300 users at peak on 2 servers.

Web P4 2,8Ghz 2GB ram and 2x 120gb SATA raid 1

DB P4 2,8Ghz 2GB ram and 4x 120gb SATA raid 1
Also a second nic's in both servers and a switch for the db network wich is seperate of the normal network.

how do you split your database up over servers?

4 dual core opteron 280's with 4gigs of RAM each for scripts, email and backup, 2 dual 3.6GHz xeon's with 6 gigs of RAM each for mysql and 1 64 athlon 4000+ with 1 gig of RAM for image serving. plus a hardware load balancer and a firewall

I wonder the same. I know how to split forum search into another db like the slave DB, but just as far as that :S
Would be great if some people around here explained or write down a guide or something. Im really interested, besides one of my boards is getting really big (well, not as big as some of the boards here)

Hi,

wich forum is this?

it's a private russian board about urban exploration and speleology. laws about trespassing are quite strict in Russia/ex-USSR countries and getting a precautionary shot in the head is not the least of our worries. so information like maps, entrance points, photos and details about our gatherings is best kept private.

community was actually started back in 1988 as a BBS running PCB MetaWorlds. much later we had to go through quite a lot of shit to convert the old db into vBulletin format.

I'm on Dual Xeon 2.8GHZ with 2GB Ram.

Board has 10k+ users with around 100+ members online at anytime.

3 months old.

currrently on 1

I'm in the process of moving to 2 servers.. but really unsure how to do it.. Anyways currently on 1 server
Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz
2GB Ram
2x73GB SCSI HDD

If anyone can tell me how to seperate the apache & mysql to 2 different servers, i will be very thankful :)

Over 5.

I have a cluster setup, an image server and a db server.

All of my sites are hosted on them. Serve up over 20GB per second in bandwidth. They seem to be holding up well for the most part. At least it's easy to plug in more power.

What do you use for load bancing the db server?

At this point, we've got 1 server but I'm looking into moving to multiple or to one larger box because we're having real problems with table locking during searches.

The current hardware is Dual 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs, 4GB of RAM and (3) 73GB SCSI drives in RAID5. The biggest board on this box has 3M posts, 370K threads, and 53K members. There are generally 250-300 concurrent users during the day and ~400 in the evenings (default cookie timeout).

I'm considering moving to a Dual, dual-core Opteron 265 box w/ 6GB of RAM and (4) 73GB Drives in RAID5 but I don't know how much that's actually going to help the issues.

5x webserver (athlon XP3200+, 1 GB Ram, 2x80 MB Raid0)
[one of these is working as stagingserver and as attachment server]
1x dbserver (dual opterin 265, 4 GB RAM, 2x160 MB Raid0)
1x seperate (premium) webspace for all images except attachments & avatars
Load balancing is simply made by DNS round robin.

Our forum has: Threads: 204,011, Posts: 9,818,856, Members: 86,900, Currently Active Users: 2364 (310 members and 2054 guests)
Most users ever online was 3,750, 28.08.2007. at 12:15.
Currently Active Users: 2364 (310 members and 2054 guests) (aprox. 2000-3000)
post.MYD is 4294967244 big ..

All that has been running on one server since 11/2006:
SuperMicro H8DCR-3 AMD Opteron 270 with 12GB RAM, 2x73 GB SCSI 10k
Now we will setup second, MySQL server..

Very good point. I see 89 votes for 1 server. Those are not big boards, IMO.
In my books, a big board has at least 4 servers. :)

? In my books, a big board has a lot of members, forums, posts.. You can have forum with 10 members on 10 servers. And you can't tell that is big board. :rolleyes:

You are missing completely my point.
We are not talking about storage facilities, but live boards with millions of posts and thousands of users online.