LAMP Production Server - Dell 2850

David Kempe dave at solutionsfirst.com.au
Sat Sep 9 22:10:57 UTC 2006


One 2850 should be able to handle 300 users on a fairly lightweight
php/mysql app. Your app will probably become CPU bound quickly,
obviously depending on its nature. You need to scale the machines in the 
direction of the problem. If you app is db intensive (lots of small 
transactions or accesses), you may even want a php/mysql pair on each 
server, and scale that way. I know a large add provider that does things 
that way, and use mysql replication.

Scaling totally depends on the application at hand, and odds on, you 
need to simply start with one machine, figure out what the bottleneck is 
after some exhaustive testing, and then design a solution that works. 
Even if that means tweaking the app to scale better. You probably need 1 
dev server, with monitoring and other services on it as well (cacti and 
nagios etc) and a testing server that is exactly the same as production 
servers. This is where Xen comes into its own :)

LVM is great, and I use it alot, but there are times when it doesn't 
make alot of sense. If you think you are going to add storage to the 
machines, then LVM make sense. When we build Xen servers, we absolutely 
use LVM to chop up the disks into resizable partitions. What you end up 
doing is figuring out what is best for the application. Servers serve 
the application :)

dave

Bill Asher wrote:
> David, In your recommendation, would there be any need for LVM then?
> I'm doing a Ubuntu LAMP install, after install how would you handle
> all the smylinks you are talking about?  I agree with your thoughts
> but am unsure how this effects your other partitions needed.
> 
> This is what I have now using LVM for the RAID5 drives: $ df -h 
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1
> 62G  227M   59G   1% / varrun               1014M   48K 1014M   1%
> /var/run varlock              1014M  4.0K 1014M   1% /var/lock udev
> 1014M   96K 1014M   1% /dev devshm               1014M     0 1014M
> 0% /dev/shm /dev/mapper/data-home 34G  129M   32G   1% /home 
> /dev/mapper/data-usr   31G  364M   29G   2% /usr /dev/mapper/data-var
> 138G  227M  131G   1% /var
> 
> 
> 
> The application we are producing is internal only via web browser.
> Using Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL5.  My thoughts were to build 2 servers
> with Apache2 & any web services and 2 servers with MySQL for database
> services. One of each being production and development servers. This
> app will be used for about 300 users.  In your opinions is this over
> kill?  Or just do 4 servers each having Apache2 and MySQL on them, 2
> production and 2 development?




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