I thought LAMP was supposed to be more scalable than IIS

[greggh]

I was listening to an interview with PlentyOfFish.com (largest free dating site) founder.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=300230#300230

He uses just ONE Windows 2003 server for a dynamic site with forums that has 31 Million pageviews/day and as much as 50,000 concurrent users. I am totally blown away. How the hell is that possible?

[adam]

I cannot believe that. Seriously, I don't believe it.

[allix]

he is lying

[snarkout]

I doubt he's "lying" but he probably has no idea what he's talking about.

[Gomer_X]

He uses just ONE Windows 2003 server for a dynamic site with forums that has 31 Million pageviews/day and as much as 50,000 concurrent users. I am totally blown away. How the hell is that possible?

This link doesn't say what kind of hardware he's using. I can believe that with a big enough server you could do that much traffic. It would be stupid to handle that much business with no redundancy, though.

This means nothing, of course, because you can't say one server is "more scalable" than another without running the same load on Linux.

I know that Myspace runs on IIS, though, and I imagine they do a fair amount of traffic. I've heard that newer versions of IIS perform pretty well.

[mowestusa]

I know that Myspace runs on IIS, though, and I imagine they do a fair amount of traffic. I've heard that newer versions of IIS perform pretty well.

I as well, have heard that Windows Server 2003 is solid, and there are others who feel IIS is just wonderful as a webserver. Now I will admit that all who have told me this have little experience to no experience with the LAMP stack or the last time they tried it goes back to 2000. Most of them are comparing Windows Server 2003 to other Windows server editions, and they comment on its stability, ease of use and set up.

Even I would admit that for the Desktop WinXP is light years ahead of Win98SE, but that doesn't mean I prefer it over my Linux boxes.

[snarkout]

He uses just ONE Windows 2003 server for a dynamic site with forums that has 31 Million pageviews/day and as much as 50,000 concurrent users. I am totally blown away. How the hell is that possible?

This link doesn't say what kind of hardware he's using. I can believe that with a big enough server you could do that much traffic. It would be stupid to handle that much business with no redundancy, though.

This means nothing, of course, because you can't say one server is "more scalable" than another without running the same load on Linux.

I know that Myspace runs on IIS, though, and I imagine they do a fair amount of traffic. I've heard that newer versions of IIS perform pretty well.

Very good point - if by "1 machine" what they meant was "1 rack, clustered" I could see it easily.

[Gomer_X]

Very good point - if by "1 machine" what they meant was "1 rack, clustered" I could see it easily.

I listened to the interview (it's pretty short), and they give no details. He just says "one server" and gives no hardware info at all.

He started on a home machine over a DSL connection, then migrated to a $100 a month server. If he is still using one server, you can get a quad core machine with 8 gigs of RAM for around $400 a month, and that might be able to handle the load.

If all you really care about is the maximum number of connections per minute, IIS is a good server. I don't think anyone ever said apache is the fastest. That's why Google doesn't use apache. If you want a secure, stable, proven platform though, IIS is not it.

[Vogateer]

Doesn't Lighttpd do a great job of scaling? I seem to remember someone from Wordpress mentioning how well Lighttpd scaled. It doesn't have all the options of Apache, but if you're not using all those options, I'd imagine it's perfect for a great number of connections.

[allix]

Doesn't Lighttpd do a great job of scaling? I seem to remember someone from Wordpress mentioning how well Lighttpd scaled. It doesn't have all the options of Apache, but if you're not using all those options, I'd imagine it's perfect for a great number of connections.

http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/

lighttpd is a secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. It has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

[treehead]

I was listening to an interview with PlentyOfFish.com (largest free dating site) founder.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=300230#300230

He uses just ONE Windows 2003 server for a dynamic site with forums that has 31 Million pageviews/day and as much as 50,000 concurrent users. I am totally blown away. How the hell is that possible?

Sure it's possible--when the bulk of your page content is served out on Linux servers hosted by Akamai or on servers that report themselves as IIS instead of Apache.

Possible...

treehead

[greggh]

The PlentyOfFish guy responds:

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/ ... g-servers/

Upgrading servers.

When you get big and do stuff no one else does there are endless people who have never built a big application come out and say its impossible, i’m lieing etc.

http://www.thelinuxlink.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14426

I did a more in-depth case study with microsoft a while back but not sure when that will come out. But since then i’ve upgraded my web server. I’m now using a server with 2 Quad Core Intel chips(Zeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of ram (only using about 800 megs) and 2 hard drives using windows x64 server 2003. Total cost was a couple of grand. The system works a lot better when going over 2 million pageviews an hour. All outbound Data is being Gzipped and even than only 30% CPU usage. To clarify I have only 1 webserver that serves all those pageviews. Most of the 100 million plus image requests a day are running through akamai. This server does serve 10’s of millions of image requests directly, but most of those images are in ram so its not much of a load.

This server wasn’t originally ment to be a webserver, I just wanted to test out the new quad cores and see how they work.

[treehead]

The PlentyOfFish guy responds:

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/ ... g-servers/

So help me out here, because obviously as a Windows SysAdmin and a former Web Developer, I have no clue what I'm talking about... How does this discount any criticisms we given here?

;treehead

[snarkout]

The guy must be doing pretty well if this is the most inflammatory thread he can find to point to. This is hardly a flame-fest by any stretch of the imagination - one person calls him a liar, and a few others are incredulous. OS aside, I'm intrigued - I can't imagine a single NIC, regardless of type, keeping up with all those millions of page hits very well, and I'm wondering what sort of pipe he has to the intarweb. Even gzipped, that's a lot of bits per hour to shove down a single pipe. As for the comment on his blog saying that a box with those specs wasn't just a couple Gs, well, we just built a similar one at work for, IIRC, around $9k, so while not "a couple, not $100k either.

[Vogateer]

Most of the 100 million plus image requests a day are running through akamai. This server does serve 10’s of millions of image requests directly, but most of those images are in ram so its not much of a load.

Nice hardware and very tiny images. It comes out to about 556 page views a second. Sounds like a lot, but I've never tried anything like that.