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Originally Posted by cd34
Really depends on what you are trying to do with your hosted stuff. If you are doing Hosted Free Sites with two Hosted Galleries behind it, you should treat it just as you would a gallery that you are submitting, and then figure out how much traffic you get from that, multiplied by the number of webmasters.
Since you have to pass affiliate codes, its my personal preference to use SSI over PHP to pass the query string from page to page, but, either one is fine. A relatively good server, P4 2.4ghz or better would have no problem handling 20mb/sec or so of traffic considering every page using PHP. Probably a bit more using SSI.
Since you have a very static setup, i.e. galleries are uploaded, there isn't much that will change, it would be relatively easy to rsync to another server and just use round-robin dns to 'load balance'.
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Hiya CD, and thanks for the feedback.
Yes, our Free Hosted Sites will have the usual warning page, main page, and two gallery pages. The thing is that since we've never done free sites or hosted galleries before, we don't have any baselines for comparison. If we did, it might be a little easier to figure what our traffic load might be. So I'm trying to get an idea (in advance) of what loads we might expect, along with suggestions on how to configure a server box and bandwidth pipe to handle the demands.
Your suggestion was that a P4 2.4ghz or better would have no problem handling 20mb/sec of traffic (is that the traffic we should expect?). But you also mentioned rsync'ing to another box.
Now, if we've ever used round-robin dns for load-balancing on anything, it was something handled by our server techs and I failed to learn much about it. :-( But it seems from what you wrote that it would take two separate dedicated server boxes rsync'd so that the round-robin dns can split the requests.
So my next question is: "Do we need two dedicated servers for this?" (And, "What should I definitely know about rsync'ing and round-robin dns?")
Okay...yes, I know "how many servers do we need?" would be an easier question to answer if I could tell you how much traffic the server(s) will have to handle, or how many simultaneous requests we get. But that's the information we don't have quite yet. I'm basically trying to guess in advance what kind of traffic we may have to handle. Maybe we should arrange a test somehow first to be sure, but I was thinking this board definitely has people who already know these kinds of things. :-)
Regarding the methods for passing the affiliate codes, that was going to be another post from me. We're leaning toward using php over ssi, mostly to get more used to using it.
And thanks for the reminder CFNMPARTY, we're looking into burying the affiliate ID in the URL like you mentioned so it's not so easy for surfers to snip the query strings. I know that I've seen an outline of how that's done here, so I'll be looking around for it.
Thanks for the feedback so far, please feel free to add more!
Simon