On November 26, 2002 06:33 am, Al Sutton wrote:
> I wouldn't go for 7.4 in production until after it's gone gold, but being
> able to cut the number of boxes per developer by giving them a Win32 native
> version would save on everything from the overhead of getting the
> developers familiar enough with Linux to be able to admin their own
> systems, to cutting the network usage by having the DB and app on the same
> system, through to cutting the cost of electricity by only having one box
> per developer. It would also be a good way of testing 7.4 against our app
> so we can plan for an upgrade when it's released ;).
If your database is of any significant size you probably want a separate
database machine anyway. We run NetBSD everywhere and could easily put the
apps on the database machine but choose not to. We have 6 production servers
running various apps and web servers and they all talk to a central database
machine which has lots of RAM. Forget about bandwidth. Just get a 100MBit
switch and plug everything into it. Network bandwidth won't normally be your
bottleneck. Memory and CPU will be.
We actually have 4 database machines, 3 running transaction databases and 1
with an rsynced copy for reporting purposes. We use 3 networks, 1 for the
app servers to talk to the Internet, 1 for the app servers to talk to the
databases and one for the databases to talk amongst themselves.
Even for development we keep a separate database machine that developers all
use. They run whatever they want - we have people using NetBSD, Linux and
Windows - but they work on one database which is tuned for the purpose. They
can even create their own databases on that system if they want for local
testing.
--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@{druid|vex}.net> | Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.
