Hardware Recommendations

Hi all:

I've been asked to put together hardware specifications for an Elgg site with approximately 20,000 registered members. Has anyone done any research on this? What does the community.elgg.org site run on?

 

  • Elgg will run on a cheap web host.  If you have 20,000 registered members, make sure you have lots of hard drive space, maybe 200GB+ just to be sure.  But the question is, how many concurrents users your site will have?  If you are expecting heavy concurrent users then you should go Dedicated Server.

  • We run 83,000 registered users on a dedicated CentOS Linux box.. 120+ simultaneous anytime..

  • Thanks, Dhruva!

    May I ask the specs on the dedicated box: CPU, memory and hard drive size? Are you running both Elgg and mySQL on the same box?

     

  • @Dhruva

    120+ concurrent users?  Is that the highest already?  Do you think a business class shared host can handle that load?

  • Specs are here @ https://order.1and1.com/xml/order/ServerPremiumQuadCoreXL;jsessionid=A323A57CD9FBB3CD117604D0E7701A54.TCpfix141a?__frame=_top&__lf=Static&ordernow=true&linkType=&linkOrigin=ServerPremium.  I'm *not promoting them, but that's what we got.

    Concurrents ? We sometimes hit 140. The usual "business class shared" ($20/mnth?) won't handle such loads - it will croak @ abt 20-30++, if even.. But be warned, with these volumes, you will hardly get any sleep ;-)

  • Yes the usual business class shared.  So how is the performance so far of your site hosted on a dedicated server?  If you don't mind, is your site for profit?

  • yr ques seems too generic ;-) "performance' per se is not for a one sentence answer. there's many tools around to monitor apache and mysql performance, e.g. here's a live sample -->

    Apache Server Status for localhost
    Server Version: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Current Time: Monday, 05-Apr-2010 17:02:50 EDT
    Server uptime: 10 days 15 hours 48 minutes 10 seconds
    27 requests currently being processed, 0 idle workers
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------

    -------- Performance Metrics -----------------------------------------------
    [--] Up for: 10d 15h 51m 8s (822M q [892.753 qps], 6M conn, TX: 492B, RX: 173B)
    [--] Reads / Writes: 97% / 3%
    [--] Total buffers: 34.0M global + 2.7M per thread (100 max threads)
    [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 309.0M (3% of installed RAM)
    [OK] Slow queries: 0% (1K/822M)
    [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 8.0M/1.3G
    [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 96.1% (47B cached / 1B reads)
    [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (8K temp sorts / 14M sorts)
    [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 1% (38K on disk / 3M total)
    [OK] Open file limit used: 9% (97/1K)
    [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 99% (1B immediate / 1B locks)
    [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 2.4M/8.0M

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------

  • Oh sorry about that.  I'm not quite an expert on this. :S

    Ok, so you said that you have 120 to 140 concurrent users.  How much load does it give to your server?  The CPU usage to be specific.  Does it reach 50% or do you still have lots of headroom just in case your concurrent users might spike up?

  • you might wanna check out a little on how performance is monitored and analyzed, etc.. ;-) cpu usage ? how many cores do you have ? speed, etc, etc ? sample -->
    Tasks: 149 total,  11 running, 138 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
    Cpu(s): 66.2%us, 14.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 19.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st
    ps: our cpu's are under-loaded;-O, ram under-loaded...!