froscon2007 - 0.96

FrOSCon
Free and Open Source Software Conference

Speakers
Ralf Schwoebel
Schedule
Day 1
Room HS5
Start time 16:30
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 26
Event type Lecture
Track Cluster
Language English
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High Traffic Webserver-Clusters On A Shoestring Budget

Building simple LAMP Clusters for high-traffic sites with a small budget

Tradebit runs 2 server clusters on Linux with more than 1 million downloads per day. One in USA for the sales of digital goods, one in Germany for video hosting. The clusters were completely built on free (as in Open Source) software and are especially tailored towards dynamic PHP pages, driven by a MySQL setup with Apache and lighttpd. This lecture will give you detailed background information and the condensed story of problems, tricks and evolution with some hints to optimize your bang for the buck.

Dynamic web sites running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) offer a cost-effective server environment for scalable and modern web applications. In combination with AJAX and other open HTML standards is this technology laying the foundation for the creation of online products for the mass market.

In 2004 Tradebit has rolled out a platform for the sales of digital goods under www.tradebit.com and hosts today more than 6,000 merchants, who sell more than 2 million files and host much more on that site. In 2006 a german platform was added as a video hosting offer for the German market. Both platforms handle more than 200,000 daily visits and more than 1 million downloads of all kind per day.

Both setups were completely created on Linux with Open Source software, including on-site video conversion or PDF previews, etc.

This lecture shows how to build such (stable) setups with minimum expenses and minimum manpower for a scalable growth path:

  • RHEL, CentOS or OpenSuSE Server: base installation, used packages
  • Apache Configuration for 100-300 PHP page-requests per second
  • Storage-Systems: NFS, GFS, iSCSI configuration, practical numbers, advantages and problems
  • Round-Robin Load Balancing or intelligent routing?
  • MySQL replication: less writes, more reads? Master-to-slaves and Master/Master Setup
  • PHP application design for massive hits
  • Memcached : the emergency plan
  • serverside tools (PDF-preview, movie conversion via FFMPEG, MP3 convertierung via LAME)
and the effects on server load. = all on standard servers with standard hosting companies For the listed bullets above, Tradebit shows the solution in a real-life environment and what alternatives are available. Additionally the current pricing with different commercial hosters shall be sketched as independent examples and a solid ballpark of time and costs shall be presented. All examples will be neutral in evaluation to avoid sales pitches. This lecture will give new Linux users a good overview of what is possible and experienced administrators a nice view behind the scenes of 2 successful Internet sites, run on Linux.

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