Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Building a high-capacity, high-availability OpenACS solution...

The hardware issue's a bit messy at the moment, because of the highly-publicized mistakes by Intel in the past year.

    I like dual CPU systems, though I only own one and it's not very heavily loaded. SMP under Linux has gotten a lot better recently. My system's really
    perky even when I try to load it down for fun.

    High-end coppermine PIIIs using a 133 MHz FSB only run with i840 and i820 chipsets. Due to bugs in the MTH that supports SDRAM, Intel had to
    recall all boards using it. Thus, you can only use i840 and i820 chipset-based motherboards with RDRAM, which costs nearly three times as much per
    byte than good 'ole PC100 SDRAM.

    Since you want lots and lots of RAM, this means an i840/i820-based solution is unattractive from a financial point of view.

    So, this leaves with a good 'ole BX board solution, running a 100 MHZ FSB processor. The sweet spot for price-performance is the P600 or P700
    (which is probably why you already have a P600).

    If it were me, I'd go with a dual P700/BX board, 512MB RAM minimum, and a couple of UW2 or UW160 10K SCSI drives, mirrored either in
    software or hardware.

    Such a machine has a LOT of capacity. Slashdot, for instance, ran on a dual P450 until last fall, and that is one busy site (it was also one slow site
    towards the end). By the time you outgrow something like a dual P700 server, you'll be able to afford whatever you want - that's my opinion.

    Of course, there's also the question as to whether or not you want to go the full route with hot swap power supplies, etc.

    As far as vendors, Dell's big Linux servers come with an Adaptec controller with a close-sourced driver, and said driver didn't link with a recompiled
    kernel when friends of mine tried to do so. They finally got everything figured out, but it was a pain in the rear. The problem might actually be RH's fault,
    not Dell's, but it was a pain regardless.

    And you need to recompile the kernel to get Postgres to use a big chunk of that RAM for its shared memory buffer.

    So perhaps VA Linux is a better source, perhaps someone here has experience with them and can comment.

    For overall component information, and system configuration information, check out the following website: www.tdl.com/~netex. Their site's a great
    resource.

I guess the short answer is figure out the sweet spot for price/performance regarding the CPU, buy lots of RAM, buy quality disks (I like IBM, and their UW2 9 GB disks are a real bargain at the moment, about $200 if you shop), decide if you want to spend the bucks  for hot-swap redundancy, then shop around and buy from someone who understands Linux.

Do you have specific questions?

I haven't played with Karl's stuff yet so can't help you on that one.