[Catalog-sig] Cheeseshop performance improved

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sat, Jun 23, 2007 at 08:51:13AM +0200, "Martin v. L?wis" wrote:
>I now took some measures to improve the cheeseshop performance.

Just a follow-up, it looks like Apache hasn't restarted since I made the
Apache changes around 9 hours ago.  We aren't out of the woods yet, I'd
say, but at the moment we have reasonable amounts of memory in cache, and
haven't gone into thrashing.  The processes seem to be hovering around
22MB.

Load is higher than I'd like, mostly due to just straight disc I/O.  More
RAM would help that by increasing the cache (the easy way) or adding more
disc spindles (the hard way).

For our hosting service we've recently been deploying relatively
inexpensive dual quad core 1.6GHz machines with 4 to 16GB of RAM and 8
drives in a RAID-10 array.  These things have tons of performance and are
relatively inexpensive, something in the $4k neighborhood (6 to 9 months
ago a similar system would have easily been 5 to 10 times that much).

I would like to propose that the PSF look at getting a box like this, with
no immediate plans for use.  Just have it sitting there in reserve for when
someone actually finds the time to move some services there or deploy new
services there.  Perhaps we could get XS4ALL to give us pricing for hosting
a box like this?  Just to give you a ballpark idea, tummy is offering this
class of machine for around $400/month, so I'd expect it to be something
the PSF can afford no problem.  I'd recommend XS4ALL to provide it, if they
can.

This is in addition to the RAM upgrade for ximinez.

Sean
-- 
 "Fixing Unix is easier than living with NT."  -- Jonathan Gilpin
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability
      Back off man. I'm a scientist.   http://HackingSociety.org/