[ic] people complaining about interchange...

[Jonathan Clark]

>> Since October of 2002 I have run IC 4.8 on the server that services
>> www.subcultural.com and www.sophee.com .  In that time, the daemon
>> has served roughly 40,000 pages a day for a total of 14 million page
>> views.  We have experienced peak traffic with as many as ten page
>> requests per second. As far as I can remember, the daemon has never
>> quit running and has only stopped responding to requests one time
>> (and that one time could easily be attributed to CPU fan failure).
>> I know that the daemon has run for at least six months at a time
>> without being shut down or restarted.
>>
>> There are absolutely no questions in my mind about Interchange's
>> speed or stability on the Linux platform.  Our hardware is top
>> notch, an Intel server-class motherboard with 2 gigs of ram, and
>> Interchange's operation on this is flawless.
>>
>
> I have prospective customers with sites that have 20,000 items with
> 20,000 hits in 8 hours. I already host a site with 20,000 items. In
> order to estimate whether my 2.7 GHz Pentium with 500 MB of ram could
> do it, I wrote a script to do a heavy search on this database once a
> second.
>
> My conclusion was that doing a search on 10,000 items once a second
> was as much as my server could handle. Would you know what the effect
> of buying more ram - say using 1 GB or more is likely to have on this
> observation? When I use the linux tool 'top' I always find that cpu
> appears to be the limiting factor,

Really this depends on how you do the search, what your database is and how
it is indexed.

We have a site doing 12,000 page impressions a day from around 18,000 items
on a PIII 700MHz with 512MB RAM. Load average is around 0.2 at peak times.
Site is IC5.0 / MySQL.

In your case you may find the amount of swapping unacceptable and this will
cause increased latency and higher CPU load. Memory is cheap - put some more
in and try it. Also, sensible database indexing and [timed-build] are your
friends.

Jonathan.


--
Jonathan Clark
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