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Old 09-30-2009, 12:09 PM   #1
nephish
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advice on server hardware


greetings all.
Our company needs to upgrade our server. I need some advice. What we have now is a Dell Poweredge 6850 ( i think ). It has 4 dual-core Xeon procs, 8 Gig Ram, and 5 disk RAID

The hardest work for our server is not serving lots of page request/ second. It works hardest bringing in, and processing information. We track the status of field machinery and post the status conditons to the website.

Our hardest work is between ruby rails and the database. We run lots of cron scripts that manipulate this data, and each request on the web page involves pulling thousands and thousands of rows, doing math on them, and posting the data in charts, graphs, etc...

So i have some upgrade questions.

Cluster or not clustering: We use MySQL database with one slave (just for backup ). Does going to something like few rack mounted computers like blade servers etc.. give better performance than just buying a lot more powerful server?

What kind of situation would best be served by having more than one computer that runs the MySQL server in replication, than just haveing more power in the one computer that does it all ( process, serve, store, etc..)

thanks for any tips
 
Old 09-30-2009, 02:23 PM   #2
TB0ne
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nephish View Post
greetings all.
Our company needs to upgrade our server. I need some advice. What we have now is a Dell Poweredge 6850 ( i think ). It has 4 dual-core Xeon procs, 8 Gig Ram, and 5 disk RAID

The hardest work for our server is not serving lots of page request/ second. It works hardest bringing in, and processing information. We track the status of field machinery and post the status conditons to the website.

Our hardest work is between ruby rails and the database. We run lots of cron scripts that manipulate this data, and each request on the web page involves pulling thousands and thousands of rows, doing math on them, and posting the data in charts, graphs, etc...

So i have some upgrade questions.

Cluster or not clustering: We use MySQL database with one slave (just for backup ). Does going to something like few rack mounted computers like blade servers etc.. give better performance than just buying a lot more powerful server?

What kind of situation would best be served by having more than one computer that runs the MySQL server in replication, than just haveing more power in the one computer that does it all ( process, serve, store, etc..)

thanks for any tips
Well, it's hard to say. It depends on how many databases/tables are being used, and how the joins and queries are structured. If you've got one database with alot of transactions processed serially, it would probably be better on one big server. If you've got numerous databases, with lots of tables, spreading each database out on it's own little blade might make it perform better. You could rule out it being I/O bound on disk, and if they're blades, the backplane communication is blazing, which would rule out a bottleneck there. Also, the CRON jobs could then be spread out between multiple blades, to run faster, but again, that depends on the DB and the app structure.
 
Old 09-30-2009, 03:15 PM   #3
nephish
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good food for thought, we have now one database (mysql) with 97 tables. These are anywhere in size from 100 million rows to less than a thousand. They are all MyISAM engine.

Did not think about using multiple databases, would have to look at my app to see how much code change that would be. May not even be able to without a whole lot of work.

Thanks for your response, by the way.
I have been on the development side of this for a few years, but pretty new to these scaling issues.
 
Old 09-30-2009, 05:41 PM   #4
choogendyk
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Have you focused some attention on tuning MySQL to get the best performance? That can make a big difference. With as many records as you have, it might be worth examining the choice of MyISAM. I was researching the choice earlier today and stumbled on two really good blog posts comparing the two: http://tag1consulting.com/MySQL_Engi...ISAM_vs_InnoDB and http://www.cftopper.com/index.cfm?blogpostid=84. Both of those have high end connections, one with drupal.org and one with wikipedia. The bottom line is that InnoDB can be a lot faster than MyISAM in the right situations. MyISAM is easier to just jump into. And, it performs better in some situations as well as just out of the box. But tuning helps there as well. After reading these two blogs, I might recommend MyISAM for the average user, but InnoDB for high end users.
 
Old 09-30-2009, 08:17 PM   #5
nephish
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hey thanks for your help and the links, the one from the consulting group i had read earlier today too, albiet, after my OP
 
  


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