Spec H/W for a Centos LAMP server

Frank_Rizzo · 7 Feb 2006 at 17:26

I'm currently using a 3.4Ghz, 2Gb RAM, Sata drives server for hosting a webserver with Centos 4.0, Apache 2 and MySQL. Would like to upgrade this to something a bit more meatier.

Any recommendations as to what to upgrade to?

I can either stick with Intel or go with AMD

Intel
I could go the Xeon route or would the new Dual Core's work fine with Centos?

AMD
Similar situation in that I could choose Opteron or would the AMD64X2 work just fine?

Looking at some of the reviews of Xeon vs Opteron it seems Opteron has the edge with MySQL.

Will need 3Gb of RAM and hardware raid 1 with a spare channel for backup disk.

Budget around £1K. Need a good combo of CPU, Ram, Mobo, PSU, disks etc.

Vonhelmet · 8 Feb 2006 at 11:29

Any particular reason for the upgrade? Are you serving a lot of pages? Is the server showing the strain?

If it's not struggling, don't bother - you'll be wasting your money.

FirebarUK · 8 Feb 2006 at 12:26

As said, your server would have to be getting pretty well hammered to be in need of replacement due to performance issues.

Frank_Rizzo · 8 Feb 2006 at 14:09

It's a database server. More searches are being done. It needs an upgrade. The majority of the data is cached so Ram speed and CPU are the bottlenecks.

FirebarUK · 8 Feb 2006 at 16:19

Opteron with an Iwill board, should do nicely for all the tasks required.
Avoid Nforce chipsets.

R4z0r · 11 Feb 2006 at 11:14

Hmm, that must be seriously busy DB to be getting bottleneck with that kind of setup. I'm no MySQL expert but have you looked into tuning it? If MySQL isn't setup accordingly for your setup you would probably see far bigger gains by tweaking than throwing HW at it.

For example, is the application connecting to MySQL through network or via a Unix socket? I *think* (Again, not an expert) that a socket is quicker so thatmay be something to try.

Here's a very detailed analysis from the developers themselves:

http://dev.mysql.com/books/hpmysql-excerpts/ch06.html

Frank_Rizzo · 11 Feb 2006 at 20:22

It's pretty muich tuned to the max. The db's get updated once a day and then the rest of the time the data is served from cache.

It's not so much that MySQL is being hogged - the data is extracted quite quickly but the php scripts need to do a lot of calculations on the data and format the reports etc.

Have php scripts optimized as much as I can and cache accelerators are used.

Reading further I think it's definitely AMD now. Can't decide between Opteron 170 or AMD64X2 4800 .....

Caged · 12 Feb 2006 at 13:42

If this is for a rack, don't even bother building your own. I'll never understand why people build rackmounts, if you're getting that many requests through it then it must be fairly critical, so grab a PowerEdge with the support options.

E1mo · 12 Feb 2006 at 13:54

Have you considered having two servers; one for generating the final pages and one for the database? This might take some of the strain off of the server doing the PHP calculations.

They could be linked using GigE.

I'm no expert on DB design, but really shouldn't you be doing all the calculations internal to the DB using things like stored procedures?

My gut feeling is that you've pushed MySQL to the limit of its capabilities.

Frank_Rizzo · 12 Feb 2006 at 17:31

I don't think MySQL is pushed to the limit - the CPU is. This is why I'm looking at going the Opteron or 64X2 route.

I'm just installing Centos on a 3400+ laptop for testing. If that generates the reports faster than the P43.4Ghz then I think it will prove that the CPU is the problem.