[TECK]

Originally Posted by dnerty

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.

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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Originally Posted by EricGT

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

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.