Re: Hardware requirements

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 01:42:23PM +0200, Marcus Herou wrote:
> Thanks a lot to you both Patrick and Willy!
>
> I will reduce the amount of memory used as you said. To be on the safe side
> I will buy at least 4G RAM since the cost is so low these days. And a
> core2duo will be more than enough on the CPU part i guess.

it should be largely enough, I sized my 10Gbps test machines with a C2D and 2G of RAM :-)

> So a cheap box for around 1000? will be enough.

this is what I generally recommend. It also has the advantage that at that price, you're not tempted by making the LB co-exist with other services on the same machine.

> I starting to wonder why the BIG IP beasts
> costs +25 000? when you get really far with a software LB.

I would say that when you pay for a commercial solution, you pay for all the packaging, integration and validation of the solution. You will also find in products such as F5 support for protocols that haproxy will not support, and developping those costs a lot. However, I always find it funny to call those "hardware LBs", because when you open the box, you see a Tyan ATX mobo turned left with RJ45 prolongators to reach the front panel ;-)

So you really pay for the software and support, not for the hardware, which is cheap nowadays.

> Yep I have the stats page enabled which is really helpful. I have not
> enabled logging though...

you really should. Even if you don't want to keep logs, you can rotate them, but haproxy's logs bring real value when you want to troubleshoot production issues.

> HAProxy is just currently eating 20mb so we can scale a whole lot more I
> guess. All our requests are so fast (no php, no perl, no ruby just in-memory
> java operations) so we will hopefully never get to more than a 1000
> connections declaring never >= 6 months :)

... or when you get some servers stuck for a few seconds due to a struggling database or network troubles causing TCP retransmits.

> Talking to you guys makes my performance questions seem small and pityable
> and damn we are the #4 site reach wise in Sweden reaching 3.5 million UB
> each week. What kind of sites are you guys really running ?

I personally do know quite well an online banking site serving about 3 billions hits a month. I'm also aware of some big download sites filling multi-gig pipes, so the usage pattern varies a lot (but all of them are interesting). To be fair, those sites are not *that* common ;-)

Regards,
Willy Received on 2008/09/28 14:22