Christof, there is lots of speed, scaling, and tuning information
spread throughout the Forums, but AFAIK there is no one centralized
place. It also probably very dependent on just what packges you're
using, what custom code you've written, etc.
Btw, there are at least a few OpenACS sites serving fully dynamic
content 1000+ concurrent users, e.g. the Learn@WU which
Gustaf has discussed
various times in the forums. (Those sites also tend to have
correspondingly massive hardware, lots of custom code, and people
managing them who have spent lots of on tuning, etc.)
Note that Malte's and Patrick's hardware recommendations above are
entirely reasonable, but they may or may not actually be necessary,
depending on your site. If your site is small you can probably run it
just fine on even a cheap desktop. (And of course if your site is
very busy, a modern 2 cpu 2 GB RAM machine might not be enough.) A
good iterative approach is something like this:
- If you have the money to just buy a new but fairly modest server
as Malte and Patrick recommend, just buy it. If you aren't willing to
spend the money yet, just take any old desktop you have lying around,
and use that. Either way, we will call this "server_1".
- Install your Development system on server_1 and get it working.
Set up your Dev site. Do your own load testing and see how things go.
(If your sever is just too wimply, everything will be slow, but you my
ind that only a few queries or pages are slow, and need to be tuned.)
Start giving your internal users accounts and have them try out
functionality.
- You need to do the above anyway to develop your site, and in
the process, you will soon start getting an idea of whether the
server_1 hardware is adequate for your needs. If server_1 is
not adequate, ideally do some investigation to figure out
what the primary rate limitor is (e.g., disk I/O, CPU, memory size),
then take an educated guess at how much bigger a machine you need.
- Note that either way server_1 probably isn't wasted money, as if
your site is busy enough that you need server_2, you will likely still
want to use server_1 for your Dev site, as a front-end webserver
machine, or etc.
