Server Load and Processing

[AusCoding Allan]

Hosting Question for the Brilliant!

I'm managing a site for a friend of mine, it runs a php survey questionnaire and is going to need to process about 400 unique visitors a minute. Will a normal server cope with this or is there a way that I can mirror it so that if the first server is too busy I can distribute the load to a second and or third server.

Any help would be appreciated!

Cheers,

Allan

[SplitInfinity]

You can do that by using "round robin" DNS entries.
Basically what you do is put the same web site on multiple servers
and just list the domain name multiple times in the DNS zone files.
So basically the DNS server will load balance them for you.

:-)

Look up Round Robin DNS on google.

[JustMe]

Greetings:

Personally, I'd use clustering technology instead of round-robin. Rotating DNS can lead to a whole host of problems, and was primarily used before modern clustering technology came up to par.

Although, we're talking about 400 uniques per minute here? You could easily handle that on a Sun box running Solaris. If you want to really nail it down, set it up on 2 Sun boxes, one for the httpd and one for whatever db you're running.

[AusCoding Allan]

Thanks guys that's really helpful!

Cheers,

Allan

[Chilihost]

How the server copes with 400 visitors a minute running php scripts is entirely upto how well written the php scripts are. Its really hard to say if a normal server will cope - it might be fine if the scripts behave and if the server is tuned properly to give priority to php over all other processes.

For high server-load applications, there is a much easier and cheaper option to clustering, you can look at dual xeon servers with a good amount of RAM in the server. Xeon processors use hyperthreading so to the operating system the dual xeon actually looks and behaves like 4 processors. Top that box up with at least 1 GB RAM (possibly upto 4GB) and you have a kick ass server that outperforms load-balanced clusters and is cheaper and easier to maintain too.

The best thing to do is test out your scripts, see if you can get a base of 400 users running the php processes simultaneously and that will give you an indication of the overall server requirements. I believe there is some testing software available that does this type of thing, you might have a hunt around to see if you can find it.

cheers,
Luke

[gaybucks_chip]

Clustering for load balancing is amazingly easy to do these days. I know of two inexpensive but reliable hosts that have "off the shelf" solutions that will handle that... ev1servers.net and servermatrix.com (aka theplanet.com). Both have reliable, inexpensive bandwidth and decent support (though I'm personally partial to Planet over EV1). Only catch is you need to be comfortable being an admin for your own server and handling all the backend. If you're not, find someone that is a reseller of one of these two and they can help you out.

[AusCoding Allan]

Thanks for your help guys.

Cheers,

Allan