shockfire

Ouch, lol.

Anyway, i've found out that a 'major host' (which will remain anonomous) puts 500 accounts per server (typically), and uses P4 2.4 servers with 1gig of ram and SCSI hard drives. All user accounts are the same (300megs space, 5gb bandwidth, capped MySQL connections), and this is one of the 'good hosts' (major uptime, extremely small downtime reported).

So that's one host anyway, and that seems fair to me. So I was probably on target at around 400 websites on a Cel 1.7 at the maximum before it blows up .

__________________

Travis

try puting that many on and see how the server reacts

__________________
"A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back -- but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you."
— Marian Wright Edelman

patrickb

Something you will find with servers, generally speaking, memory is more important that actual CPU power. For example, if you have 10 users downloading a 100 meg file, you need 1000 megs of memory for accomodate those users while they finish their download. Otherwise, it will use swap space (hard drive equivalent of RAM) to store the files. Once the server has to start using swap space, the CPU load starts to climb very high since it spends more time reading from the swap space than it does actually processing data.

Im not 100% sure if Apache (the web server) actually caches the entire file as it is downloaded, but I know a large chunk of it is. If you have low traffic sites with small pages, you could easily manage 400 on that server. If you have only 10-20 huge traffice sites with some large downloads, well, you will definitely be in trouble with that setup.

But it also requires some experimentation. You never know what mix of clients you will have. Sometimes you may have only 100 clients that have about 5 pages each for a total of less than 300k and very little traffic. Other times you may have 50 huge sites all of a sudden. The best thing to do in your case is start small and upgrade as you go along.

Memory being the first thing to upgrade. Then if you notice that the system is not using much swap space but still has a high CPU load, its time to upgrade the CPU.
This isn't a perfect explanation, but it gives you an idea of what to expect in the future.

__________________
Patrick

Warnings: The program(s) might crash unexpectedly or behave otherwise strangely. (But of course, so do many commercial programs on Windows.) --www.gimp.org

xmac

I'm currently having about 110 sites on my dedicated (cel 1.7). It's a fine mix between very small sites, and some larger ones with quite a bit of traffic and requests.

Normally the load average is very low, but in peak times its been max at 1.6, which really isn't that high.

I would guess that between 250-300 is the max I would have on my server if I continue to have the same mix between small and large sites. Some sites really don't generate traffic at all, but some do so it's kinda hard to give an exact estimate.

SQL is the real drain anyway..

__________________
Server: dedicated

Ehaanaes

Yeah.. I am the master of using the CPU via MySQL.. hehe..
I think i'll go dedicated soon..

Anyway.. Please give us some feedback when you have tried it out more!!!

__________________
Owner of Minerva and Server :: Beatiful P4's Surpass
http://www.case-spider.com
Winner of the Surpassies 2004 - Most Spirit. :bravo:
Google = Friend!