Re: PGXN Hosting - Mailing list pgsql-www

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 20:05, David E. Wheeler <david@kineticode.com> wrote:
> On May 11, 2011, at 10:52 AM, Dave Page wrote:
>
>> Yes. Assuming you can use Debian. You'll get monitoring and updates
>> for free though, as our hosting platform manages that for us.
>
> I'm using Ubuntu now, so that's fine, as long as I can compile stuff from source (Perl 5.12 for example).

Yuck.

That is a big no-no on any reasonable hosting platform. That will kill
all monitoring and management of patches, etc.

It really won't work with a standard perl? How much work to make it so?


>> What sort of size machine were you looking for?
>
> Right now the usage of PGXN is quite light. And the main site itself relies almost entirely on static JSON files to
generatecontent (only the search engine is dynamic). So its needs are pretty modest. 
>
> There are four parts:
>
> 1. PGXN Manager. This is a full PostgreSQL-9.0-backed web app, with authentication and all dynamic requests. This is
theapp one uses to register for the network and to upload distributions. Its usage is therefore pretty light. 

We do have a general policy that all services should use our community
login system. Is there a particular reason this one shouldn't? If not,
I'd much like to see that happen at the time something is moved into
the infrastructure - for consistencys sake.


> 2. The master mirror server. PGXN Manager manages it, and otherwise all it needs are an rsyncd instance for it and a
Webserver to serve its files. I've been using Apache. 
>
> 3. PGXN API. This is a glorified mirror. It syncs from the master mirror every hour and processes things, creating
HTMLdocumentation pages and updating the full-text index (which is not tsearch, BTW). 
>
> 4. PGXN Site. Reads directly from the PGXN API document root to serve the site.
>
> So there are quite a few things it does, but almost all the Web serving is static or lightly processed files. There's
onPostgreSQL 9.0 database and otherwise a mix of Apache, Plack, and rsync processes and cron jobs. The current box is
real(not virtual), but modest: 2 cores, RAID 0, 2GB RAM. The current database is only 8MB in size, so memory
requirementsare not huge. I'd be surprised if it hit 100MB in the next six months. 

Ok, should be easy enough to host on one of the machines we have available.

Is there any of this software that is *not* available as packages in
standard debian? (which I assume would be the same as ubuntu for
these). Any such things makes it a big PITA from the management
systems side, since you'll have to write monitors and stuff
manually...

Other than that; I don't see anything on your requirements that shouldn't work.


> Long term, I think it will make sense to split these tasks up into two boxes, but for now, just one modest box ought
todo the trick. 

Yeah, splitting the tasks clearly apart as you have done is a good way
to be able to do that later - but by what you'r esaying here it
certainly doesn't sound like it needs to be done from the start.

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/