Re: Resource estimation

Tim Berners-Lee ([email protected])
Wed, 16 Jun 93 10:04:22 +0200


>Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1993 15:11:30 +1200
>From: Nathan Torkington <[email protected]>

>
>For my proposal that's going to the committee here (I'm soon going
to
>make all my CWIS documents available for public review via our WWW
>server -- I wrote them in HTML so it shouldn't be too hard to serve
>them :-) I need some estimates of the hardware to run a dedicated
WWW
>server off.
>
>We will have about 10,000 users (hopefully :-) and I hope for
>relatively high usage. Can anyone suggest a suitable platform?
>
>Nat.

In fact, the load on an HTTP server machine is very slight,
because the process only runs as long as it takes to return
the document. The info.cern.ch server which has the Subject
Catalogue gets probably a relatively high usage, about
10k requests a day, or (thinks...) one every 9 seconds.
the CPU load is negligible. In fact of course the peak rate
is higher, but still its not really a factor.

So I would recommend that you chose the platform as one
which has good *reliability*, one which your operators will
know how to back up and handle in an emergency, one with
good connectivity (like ability to mount appleshare and
Novell stuff might be useful).

A greater load than the httpd server will occur if
you allow telnet sessions to www or lynx, of course.
If you allow people to telnet in and select XMosaic
to their Xterminal, then you'd better get something
really beefy!

Remember to allow lots of disk room for logs.

Tim