help choosing sever
 

I'm looking to set up a file server to serve:

- 1000 connections dl 2mb file

what specs do i need:

- CPU power (single/multiple cpu, single/multiple core)
- Memory (2, 4, 6, 8 gigs)
- Uplink speed

looking forward for suggestion.

Thanks

that's really not enough to go on. a pentium 200mhz box with 32mb of ram could very easily cope with what you've listed there, dependent on the way it is used... what does 1000 mean? concurrent i guess? how fast do you want to serve it? you can serve 2mb in 2 seconds or 2 hours... is it only 1 file?? in general, if that really is all you need, absolutely any old box with the fastest internet connection you can afford...

- yes 1000 concurrent connections
- 2mb file in 2 mins would be decent
- there are dozens of file but on average it about 2mb each
- each peer will only get one connection

Hi.

Let's say, 1000 connections each requesting a 2MB file = 2000MB = 2,048,000KB = 2,097,152,000B = 16,777,216,000b
Downloading this over 2min = 120s gives: 139,810,133b/s
If we call it a 25% overhead for TCP and application protocol, we've got: 174,762,666b/s
So you'll need around a 180Mb/s connection, assuming everyone's downloading at once.
If only half the users are downloading at any one time, you could probably get away with a single 100Mb full duplex ethernet card.

As for the machine needed for this, any old Pentium 2/3 with a few hundred MB of RAM should suffice. If there's a lot of different files available, then adding more RAM should let the system cache the files and avoid too much disk IO.

Dave

ok, well you can do the maths yourself for the bandwidth... 2mb = 8Mbits, 2 mins = 120 seconds, connections = 1000 so speed = 1000 * 8/120 = 66mbps. ouch! if you wish to serve that sort of data rates, and from the position i assume you're at, you just need hosting. and within the specs of any hosted service, you'll be fine.

hmm, ok i've been assuming this is an internet connection. why did i assume that? no idea.

anyway, based on those existing numbers, still any basic server can do this without breaking a sweat. there are certainly no cpu or memory issues, when the demand is just for network IO. i would assume that the bottleneck would lie elsewhere, on your router or some such, as i sure as hell(*) hope you've not got 1000 machines on a flat lan.

* bearing in mind that hell is blatantly not sure, nor even real...

Is it:

a) a file server, so the internet does not come into it in any way, but it needs to do NFS or Samba (depending on your clients)? In which case the speed is suspiciously slow.

b) an internet interface, and this is your estimate of bandwidth (and somewhere there will need to be a firewall and this thing may be acting as a cache, may be caching DNS lookups, may even be the primary nameserver)...not sure where you get a single wire with 2000 MB/S (that was file rather than wire, so those would be Bytes not Bits) coming into the building? Or does it have to act as a concentrator for several net links?

c) some combination of the above?

d) something I haven't been able to guess?

and ??

If it is internet bandwidth you are talking about, it seems unlikely that every single user will be downloading all of the time (& maybe there will be some uploading going on), so maybe those figures need some attention.

2mb = 8Mbits

heh, yeah... doh! 2mb = 16 mbits... what a muppet!