How to distribute the load

[dbrogan]

I'm in the process of upgrading our office's servers to OS X. For the time being, I have two 350 MHz iMacs (with lots of RAM) as servers. I need to provide file sharing, mail, DNS, FileMaker Server databases, and a website.

We'd been doing this on three machines:

1) FIle sharing, mail, and DNS for about 13 users.

2) Web server serving about 10,000 pages per day.

3) Dedicated FileMaker Server, serving about 10 databases to 13 users.

As I said, for now, we need to consolidate down to the two servers. I'm considering OS X Server, if that helps. Can I combine the file sahring, mail, dns, and web on one box with good performance? Or should I make the web server standalone and put the databases with the others?

Thanks.

 

[scruffy]

...surely none of us can.

Maybe you could do some tests on your existing 3-computer setup - see the man pages for commands like netstat, uptime, top, maybe vm_stat - to find out what resources are most and least used where (CPU, RAM, disk, bandwidth). Where are there bottlenecks, where unused resources? Do some juggling, and see how you can get closest to an even distribution of the resource that is in shortest supply.

Also, we don't know the details of your system. Are the 10,000 pages a day "Hi, this is my resume" or the source code for GNU emacs? What is most critical in terms of security (file server more than mail server, perhaps?), and performance (how dire is it if the DB is a little slow? the mail server? etc.)

Anything that is security-critical should probably go on a computer that has no externally visible IP address, almost certainly not on a computer that has a web or mail server on it.

 

[dbrogan]

Fair enough. I guess what I was looking for was some insight into whether OS X is better than OS9 in terms of carrying multiple loads.

-Dan

 

[scruffy]

Ah, yes, that it is. Much better . Didn't realize your 3 computers were running OS 9.

I guess netstat et al wouldn't be much use testing the load of your OS 9 servers