High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Website stats:

Webserver: Apache 2.2
Database: MySQL 5.0
APC cache for php
CMS: Drupal 6.2 (bleeding-edge version)*
*Aggressive caching is ON, Page Compression ON, Block Cache ON (can't use CCS),Optimize CSS/JS ON.
2 Servers: Apache/Mysql (low-tech servers - Celeron processors, 512 MB RAM, 7200 RPM HDD)
Bandwidth 10 Mb/s

The benchmark:

Used ab : ab -n 1000 -c 20 howwhatwho.com

Server Software: Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname: howwhatwho.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 41639 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 13.556796 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 42118000 bytes
HTML transferred: 41639000 bytes
Requests per second: 73.76 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 271.136 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 13.557 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3033.90 [Kbytes/sec] received

The Apache server is also running the postifx and bind although they aren't resource intensive applications.
The Cron job for drupal runs every 50 minutes, and the agreggator module is enabled and fetches more than 30 rss feeds every time.

The site used to be hosted on a single Celeron machine but on peak times the CPU went up to 80 %.

Question : Does anybody know a website hosted on an IBM Mainframe? :) Todd?

Hi everybody :)

We have a bunch of webservers (about 14 at this time) running Apache. As application framework we're using PHP with the APC Cache installed to improve performance. For load balancing we're using a Big F5 system with dynamic ratio (SNMP driven)

To sync new/updated sourcecode we're using subversion to "automaticly" update these servers with our latest software relases. After updating the new source to these production servers the load of the mashines is raising to hell.

While updating the servers, they are still in "production", serving webpages to the users. Otherwise the process of updating would take ages. Most of the time we're only updating in the morning hours while less users are online, because of the above issue.

My guess is, that the load is raising that high, because APC needs to recompile a bunch of new files each time. Before and while compiling the performance simply is "bad".

My goal would be to find a better solution. We want to "sync" code no matter how many users are online (in case of emergency) without taking the whole site down.

How you're handling this issues ? What do you think about the process above ? Do you may find the "problem" ? Do you have similiar issues ?

Feedback is highly welcome :)

Greetings,

Stephan Tijink
Head of Web Development

| fotocommunity GmbH & Co. KG
| Rheinwerkallee 2
| 53227 Bonn