Bandwidth and Hardware :)

[Hollywood]

Originally posted by bart
ok, this is going overboard now i think.

Originally posted by bart
this is only a publicity stunt.

Hey man, some of us consider this more of a car enthusiast community. People deserve recoconition, as they helped someone on this forum recover something as important as their car. On average a car is the 2nd most expensive item one person owns, chances are they work hard for their money, and someone here helped that person recover that.

If because of that beyond gets recognized that good for beyond, Rage pays for the beyond server (which is big $$$ computing power), bandwith and other misc items so we have a smooth operating, fast forum. If beyond gets some free publicity then hey....rage and beyond deserve it at the least. And if you want to be a dick about it................

THINK Every time you hit your beyond.ca favorite, submit a post, get a laugh from some reading or a funny video, seen some boobies in ask Leo, buy a used PS2 in the market place, try to sell your car.......That Rage has payed for that out of his own personal pocket and hard work!

[bart]

buddy, well if you worked hard for your car, would you leave the keys in it?

and, its cheaper to run a server than you think. well depending on who your host is, and if you know the business. keeping this server running alone, not counting any other costs, is no more than $50 per month, that is my guesstimate.

[Hollywood]

Originally posted by bart
buddy, well if you worked hard for your car, would you leave the keys in it?

and, its cheaper to run a server than you think. well depending on who your host is, and if you know the business. keeping this server running alone, not counting any other costs, is no more than $50 per month, that is my guesstimate.

I hate to break it to you but Beyond rides on a fiber based 10meg circuit which is closer to 3000K a month....Not cadvision.

Here is the server beyond is on. Dual hyper threading Xeons 5 GHZ combined, 2 gigs of memory, not your moms 900mhz Compaq presario, well over 3000K worth of power here.

When you start to know what your really talking about let me know.

[rage2]

hehe the circuit is shared, so I don't pay $3k a month (the bill hovers around $3-3.5k a month). I pay about $120/month.

The hardware cost sounds about right tho hehe.

[bart]

HOLLYWOOD:

when it comes to servers and hosting, i know more than you. the "3000k" in your post, is that $3,000, $3,000,000, or 3000 as a voltage rating? lol. your post is confusing. btw, there is not such thing as cadvision anymore.

and having two processors which run at 2.5ghz each DOES NOT give you 5ghz genius.

also, for $99US you can get a dedicated server, 700GB's of bandwidth, and a P4 CPU. more than enough for what beyond.ca needs. i am 99% sure they do not go over 100GB's of xfer per month.

but enough about that, you want to argue with me on this, fine, start another thread, for now, keep this one on topic, like i had done in the past at least.

[rage2]

There's a lot of neat hosting packages out there, but unfortunately, they cap performance quite heavily. beyond servers is a playground for me, I get to mess around with CGI optimization for work purposes (which is why I get to host it at work for cheap). All this hardware is there for a reason, so when you view a thread, it comes up instantly, and not 5 seconds later.

If I moved beyond to a $90/month 100GB usage, the site would be down for 2 weeks a month . Either that or I'd get charged $1000 a month for overuse.

Anyways, lemme do a short writeup on bandwidth usage, servers, configurations, and other neat info. It's pretty interesting. Off to compile some stats...

[Hollywood]

Originally posted by bart
HOLLYWOOD:

when it comes to servers and hosting, i know more than you. the "3000k" in your post, is that $3,000, $3,000,000, or 3000 as a voltage rating? lol. your post is confusing. btw, there is not such thing as cadvision anymore.

$3000 dollars of computing power, 3K got me there. I know there is no Cadvision, it was an example of a dialup company.

Originally posted by bart
HOLLYWOOD:

and having two processors which run at 2.5ghz each DOES NOT give you 5ghz genius.

I realize that, but it does give you a combined total of 5ghz of computing power.

Originally posted by bart
HOLLYWOOD:

Also, for $99US you can get a dedicated server, 700GB's of bandwidth, and a P4 CPU. more than enough for what beyond.ca needs. i am 99% sure they do not go over 100GB's of xfer per month.

I'm glad you the new IT guy for beyond and have decided what beyond needs for server specs and bandwith.

Rage here answers you Super IT genious sugestions.

Originally posted by rage2
There's a lot of neat hosting packages out there, but unfortunately, they cap performance quite heavily. beyond servers is a playground for me, I get to mess around with CGI optimization for work purposes (which is why I get to host it at work for cheap). All this hardware is there for a reason, so when you view a thread, it comes up instantly, and not 5 seconds later.

If I moved beyond to a $90/month 100GB usage, the site would be down for 2 weeks a month . Either that or I'd get charged $1000 a month for overuse.

Originally posted by bart
but enough about that, you want to argue with me on this, fine, start another thread, for now, keep this one on topic, like i had done in the past at least.

I can argue if I wish. Just show some respect.

[bart]

personally i think ev1 servers are the best bang for your buck.

http://www.ev1servers.net/english/index.asp

celeron proc's w/ 700gb xfer for $89. (only good for hosting files, moderate sized msg board)

dual xeon w/ 700gb xfer for $199. and go up to 1200gb. (now we're talking)

-> now, my point is, i'm trying to explain to hollywood that there is no way it costs $3,000 per month to run beyond. it can be done with one of the above servers. yes the celery might not be enough, but bw is, more than enough for sure. if not overkill.

so who wants to place bets before rage posts the stats? lol

[rage2]

First off, the Web Server.

Abit motherboard (Intel chipset)
P4 2.53Ghz CPU
512MB DDR RAM
2 x 120GB Maxtor 7200rpm in RAID-1 mirror configuration
Windows 2000 Server SP4
IIS5 running PHP ISAPI extensions

For anti-hotlinking and other IIS tricks, redec wrote "LeechBlocker" ISAPI to fulfill our needs (that's right, redec's an administrator for a reason!)

In terms of security, on the internet side (what you guys can access) it's restricted to port 80. That's all you guys have access to.

For us fortunate enough (admins), we get to access via secure VPN behind the firewall. Even the vbulletin administration panel is restricted on the internet side to prevent unauthorized access.

[rage2]

Next, CPU usage on the web server. Memory (obviously) is an overkill here, but we do run the database on the same server when we have to do maintainance, so we need that memory.

When the DB runs on here, CPU is pretty much maxxed to 100%. Right now (10 seconds ago) we're averaging around 40% cpu usage. That's just IIS and PHP.

When you notice things are slow, that means we're doing maintainance behind your back... and the DB is running on this server .

[Hollywood]

Originally posted by bart
personally i think.

No thinky....just respect.

[rage2]

As for bandwidth... just the forums alone (not including our image/video server), we use 60-70GB a month.

Oct, we used 72.06GB (ignore the average, it's incorrectly adding November numbers).

Remember, this is just the forums, and text only. Also, all our text is compressed (if you use a network sniffer, you'll see all http traffic is gzip compressed).

[bart]

hollywood:

what do you mean show respect? i was showing it until you *thought* you knew what you were talking about.

rage:

am i correct if i were to say that attachments are part of the forum bandwidth? not just the text?

[bart]

and speaking of publicity, i like beyond, and have nothing against it getting some. i'm somewhat of a computer programmer, so i made a site where message boards will be able to get spidered by search engines. see, vbulletin uses dynamic links, so it has a bunch of garbage people dont care about in the url, neither do search engines. i made a spider which takes that information, caches a site as flat content, allowing it to be indexed.

www.boardflyer.com i recently started, just a little project, we'll see where it goes, beyond and a few other boards are on the list.

but hollywood, i'm sure you were familiar with this kind of stuff.

[rage2]

Our video/images server serve up approx 5x the bandwidth of the forums server. This is because each video averages around 10MB in size . In total, the 2 sites use about 340GB of bandwidth a month!

The hardware for the video server is quite old. An old box I had laying around... remember the Abit BP6 motherboard?

Abit BP6 Motherboard
Dual Celeron 450Mhz
384MB SDR RAM
4 x 80GB Maxtor 7200rpm in RAID-1 mirror configuration
160GB Total Disk Space
IIS5 with redec's LeechBlocker ISAPI filter

[rage2]

Originally posted by bart
message boards will be able to get spidered by search engines. see, vbulletin uses dynamic links, so it has a bunch of garbage people dont care about in the url, neither do search engines.

http://forums.beyond.ca/archive

hehe, it was a PHP/Apache only script, which I "adapted" to run under IIS .

[rage2]

The beyond.ca mail server runs off this image/video server as well, so CPU usage is a bit high (gotta serve all that spam!)

Oh, forgot about email bandwidth too... each post reply sends an email out to ppl that use the email notification feature... 400GB a month total? Not unrealistic!

This server could really use a memory upgrade...

[bart]

lol, i know the /archive thing is standard on vb3, and a hack is available for vb2. but i searched google and nothing came up from beyond last time i checked, therefore added it to boardflyer. now i have to wait until googlebot reaches my site, and we'll see what happens.

you have it easier, because you read directly from the db, i had to take a few hours and write a parser to manually parse the html, and get rid of junk.

[rage2]

And behind all those servers runs our brand spankin' new database server.

Intel Server Motherboard
Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz w/Hyper Threading (4 virtual cpus)
2GB of DDR RAM
4 x 120GB Maxtor 7200rpm in RAID-1 mirror configuration
240GB Total Disk Space

This server is connected to the web servers via our new 1000mbit CAT5 backbone. This allows us to move databases really quickly at 1gbit!

[rage2]

mmmm... disk space! All RAID protected, with alarms that page me. All backups are done 4x a day, nightly off the server, and weekly offsite (part of company backups).

Currently, the beyond mysql database sits at around 2gb... so we have a lot of room to grow!