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My website is growing and growing. So now i'm considering moving to a 2-server virtual rack (in ThePlanet).
Im thinking on using one server for the DBMS and the other for the Webserver (currently I have both things on one single machine).

Given that setup, would it be enough 100Mbps for the server-to-server link??
or should I consider having a 1 Gbps rack ??

More info:
By now my site have a little more than 1 million pageviews a day and on the peak hours (from 14:00 to 18:00) about 85 thousand pageviews each hour.
Also, on the peak hours the traffic associated to the web content (html, css, images, etc..) reaches between 50 and 60 Mbps, for a total of about 200GB a day.

What I really dont know is whether a 100Mbps ethernet link will perform as good as a socket file (MySQL) for the dbms-webserver comunication.

HopelessN00b
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GetFree
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7 Answers7

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It depends entirely on how much data you are moving from machine to machine. I suspect that most web applications even talking to databases would have a hard time saturating 100MBps link. Benchmarking your website's database usage would be a good start. That said if there isn't a significant cost difference I suppose I'd go with the faster one, but if there wasn't a significant cost difference you probably wouldn't be asking.

Laura Thomas
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  • I read somewhere that ThePlanet's virtual racks only allow 100Mbps. So if you want a 1Gbps link you need a private rack which is waaaay more expensive. – GetFree Aug 07 '09 at 17:40
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    +1 - Benchmark. You can't manage what you don't measure. It's a cliche, but it's true. – Evan Anderson Aug 07 '09 at 18:08
  • @Evan: that's not a cliche, it's the entire reason for the Kelvin scale. – Ernie Aug 07 '09 at 21:06
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i'd say - take 1gbit. even that is painfully slow nowadays if you quickly need to push backup from one box to another. i assume you deal with tens or hunrads of gigabytes of content.

if you have 1-5GB of data - then fast ethernet should be fine.

pQd
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If gig isn't that much more expensive I would say go for it. 100 could be fine, but gig is almost commodity these days, and will give you headroom for future growth.

It might be worth pulling back some stats on your sites perf and operation though; you're serving a lot of mixed content so see how much of that involves DB lookups and how much is purely static content. Then make your decision.

Maximus Minimus
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The 100Mbps should be fine most day-to-day web application use. If you're planning on frequently copying large files between the systems though you should definitely so w/ the 1Gbps (eg. for backups).

Dave Forgac
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Depends on your traffic.

Based on your information above. 100Mbps is probably "good enough" for now.

KPWINC
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I would guess that you probably can continue with 100M for a 2 machine environment for quite a while. While you are at it setup trend monitoring to keep tabs on your performance. Monitor service response times as well as bandwidth. There are lots of good tools for this. MRTG is easy to setup and is free. Cricket, Cacti, Torus, and ganglia are also free but may be overkill for now.

The real answer depends on a lot of factors that you didn't list. 100Mb/second networks max out at a bit more than a CD (700Mbyte) per minute for throughput. The best answer for this question would to look at your current usage and trends then extrapolate from there.

If you start seeing tabletops or if your average is more than 40% of the available bandwidth then you need to start growth plans. Once you are averaging 60% you should have an idea as to your growth pattern and speed.

Good Luck

Rik Schneider
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Another thing, your bottleneck might not be the Ethernet connection but your HDD speed. Slow drives and slow read/write times can delay things a good bit.

Valien
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