[LA.pm] OMG! I walked out on my check!

[Max Clark]

Ask,

It's always fun to see this talk - I caught it the first time at OSCON
in San Diego and really solidified for me ideas that I had and a path
to work down.

I kinda feel like I should pound on this a little more - the use of a
proxy in front of the application server is the #1 optimization item
(bang for the buck) you can implement. If you are not already doing
it, just move your main Apache instance to a different port and use
mod_proxy - it's an extremely simple hack and goes a long way.

We are currently using Squid as our main proxy of choice (I am going
to be looking at perlbal and Varnish this weekend). I like Squid
because we can cluster the caches and share objects between the nodes.
If you haven't already done so, check out this article from etoys.com
http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/596 it's a little dated but drives home
Ask's points from last night.

This specific proxy server is a dual 3 ghz, 4GB Ram, 2x 73 GB 15k RPM
drives (way overkill but the budgeting process for this site dictates
that the hardware lasts 5 years so we bought big). It's not very busy
now, but I've seen our open connections to port 80 exceed 5000 with
the load average under 1.00. I think the sweetspot would be a single
CPU, 1-2 GB Ram, and a single 15k RPM drive - don't invest in
redundancy on the proxy tier, just by multiple machines.

proxy01# uptime
5:12PM  up 46 days, 23:14, 2 users, load averages: 0.16, 0.19, 0.22
proxy01# ps ax | grep squid | wc -l
      48
proxy01# ps ax | grep rd.pl | wc -l
      46
proxy01# netstat -na | grep 80 | wc -l
     828

My _favorite_ load balancers on the market right now are the Foundry
ServerIron FCSLB8, if you can spend a little more purchase the XL
version. You can find these all day long for $2k and they are worth 10
times that. Don't let the number of ethernet ports discourage you, you
will only use one of them. We have these all over the city pushing
incredible amounts of traffic.

Ask is dead on with PF and pfsync on FreeBSD, we've maxed out single
CPU firewalls at a little over 700 Mbit of throughput. pfsense
(http://www.pfsense.com/) is awesome if you are console shy.

Sorry I missed food, I was late for another engagement. My work
contact info is below - it's a little more reliable than gmail :)

-Max

Max Clark
Creative Thought, Inc.
(800)281-2149 x 3874
(866)369-0953 24/7 Support
max at cthought.com

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On 3/21/07, Cynthia Kiser <cnk at caltech.edu> wrote:
> Quoting Ask Bj?rn Hansen <ask at develooper.com>:
> > Eh, now the slides are actually there.
>
> Thanks Ask. That was a terrific talk. The slides will be a real
> help. I also wish I had a recording - or was going to the MySQL
> conference.
>
> > Who was the guy in the back in the white shirt?   Are you subscribed
> > here?  Does anyone know him?    I wanted to say hello but then he was
> > gone!
>
> The guy who was being so helpful about load balancers and caching
> engines? Don't know. Please identify yourself so I can say thanks.
>
> --
> Cynthia Kiser
> cnk at caltech.edu
>
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-- 
Max Clark
http://www.clarksys.com