[ic] Running IC Under Heavy Load

[Paul Vinciguerra]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 16:44:21 -0500, Mike Heins wrote
> Quoting Bryan Gmyrek (bryangmyrek at yahoo.com):
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm starting a new project and will have something like a database with 
> > a million 'products' or more and at least a million unique visitors (so 
> > say like 10 million 'hits') a day ... but it won't actually be a store 
> > so none of the e-commerce functions of IC are needed.
> > What I'm worried about is will IC be able to handle that load on, say a 
> > dual xeon, 2gb ram box?  Or alternatively will it be able to handle 
> > that load better or as well as comparable applications.  Testimonials 
> > would be great! :)
> 
> No, you will need a server cluster. I know of no dynamic application
> will handle that type of load on a single machine when querying a 
> million- item database.
>
This sounds like 2 or 3 clusters of machines to me.  On large sites, we use a
pair of apache servers for reverse proxy and static content that are front
ends to a pair of application servers and possibly a pair of database servers. 

Another technique I've seen people use is to generate all the pages statically
with an external script at some fixed interval.  In any case, you need to
reduce the number of "expensive" operations done on your site.

You might be interested in looking at
http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/apps/scale_etoys/etoys.html#Load_Balancing_and_Failover
and
http://perl.apache.org/outstanding/success_stories/index.html

In any case, the amount of tuning to the OS, apache and IC is not trivial.

Based on your numbers, you are looking at 12 new sessions a second and 120
page views a second.  How could you consider this volume without any type of
redundancy?  Hard drives, NICs and power supplies do fail.  How long can you
live without your site being up?  How do you plan to roll out changes and
upgrades?  

Paul
 
> -- 
> Mike Heins
> Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
> phone +1.765.647.1295  tollfree 800-949-1889 <mike at perusion.com>
> 
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