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Multiple sites on one server or one site per server?
Written By montoya on Oct. 25, 2007.
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I've hit a roadblock due to the fact that I don't know much about this problem so I'm looking to see if people with more experience can give me some advice:
What's better? I've got three sites, one gets 40k hit/day, another 15k, another 10k. They are not very well optimized but I'm working on that (adding caching, etc.). Say I could move all three sites to one very powerful server (2x Quad Core Xeon, SAS Drive, 2G RAM) or move each site to a separate "pretty-good" server (Dual Core Pentium D, SATA Drive, 1G RAM). All the other features are the same, OS setup, Fast CGI, APC/Cache::Cache, etc. These are Perl/PHP sites with MySQL backends.
Any advice?
montoya
Written Oct. 25, 2007 / Report /
My thoughts were (just to provide a little more background):
- If each site is on its own server, it doesn't have to compete for RAM or CPU processes and if one site has issues, it won't affect the other two.
- If we get a big server that can more than handle these sites, then we can scale a bit better since we can add more sites on that server and still not have problems. (but this might not be true).
- I really can't tell the performance difference between the specs the one big server has and the specs of the smaller servers... I just want each site to be fast and handle all the traffic and then some.
Ozone42
Written Oct. 25, 2007 / Report /
I have a few servers. On one server I run 60 sites. A couple sites on that one get 100-200k hits in a day. That server is an athlon 2200 with a gig of ram and non sata hard drives.
Another server I have only two sites. The reason I have that one is because the 60 site server I've deemed "full," I don't want to stretch it's resources any further.
Unless you're getting hammered, have a bad setup, or a runaway process, you really don't need that much power to serve websites, even highly interactive ones.
montoya
Written Oct. 26, 2007 / Report /
Ozone: Hmm, that's some food for thought right there. That's the kind of numbers I needed to hear too. The sites I'm talking about are seriously lacking in optimization, but maybe if I can improve them, I'll be able to scale down the number of servers we have, or at least free up a lot of resources for new ones. Thanks for the advice.