CF Server Specs?

[Gnarwhal]

What sort of server requirements do you think Christian Forums has? This has been something I've been curious about for a while, I think at one point I read CF has roughly 15-16,000 unique visitors per day.

With that kind of web traffic, what kind of bandwidth and server resources do you think are necessary to maintain Christian Forums?

One thing I'm curious about is if this requires an entire array of servers or if a custom desktop machine allocated for server use would suffice. I'm inclined to assume the former, but what do I know?

 

[pgp_protector]

A few years ago when Erwin was running the site I recall their being multiple boxes running the site

I think (IIRC)
1 X Database
2 X Web Servers
1 X Master

 

[Gnarwhal]

A few years ago when Erwin was running the site I recall their being multiple boxes running the site

I think (IIRC)
1 X Database
2 X Web Servers
1 X Master

Interesting, do you think it's grown since then?

 

[EphesiaNZ]

One thing I'm curious about is if this requires an entire array of servers or if a custom desktop machine allocated for server use would suffice. I'm inclined to assume the former, but what do I know?

Difficult to say but where you are dealing with databases or serious internet traffic then it always pays to have at least two of everything, servers, SQL databases etc. Maybe two of everything at two locations too. These days virtual machines make duplicating stuff for redundancy or load balancing easier.

As always it depends on how serious you are about what you do and the available $$$ to do it.

 

[Sketcher]

It would have to be load balanced. And even though it's using Litespeed, I'd imagine the webservers are pretty beefy. Given the speed and the stability of the site in the face of all this traffic, there's probably some PHP opcode caching and a dedicated SQL server or cluster. Since vBulletin is very demanding to MySQL, both of them are very fine-tuned if MySQL is being used for the databases.

You could in theory run a forum this full-featured on a single machine, if it didn't have very much traffic. But vBulletin on a single server with a decent amount of traffic will tax it. A dedicated SQL server would be pretty high on your list of possible upgrades.

 

[Gnarwhal]

It would have to be load balanced. And even though it's using Litespeed, I'd imagine the webservers are pretty beefy. Given the speed and the stability of the site in the face of all this traffic, there's probably some PHP opcode caching and a dedicated SQL server or cluster. Since vBulletin is very demanding to MySQL, both of them are very fine-tuned if MySQL is being used for the databases.

You could in theory run a forum this full-featured on a single machine, if it didn't have very much traffic. But vBulletin on a single server with a decent amount of traffic will tax it. A dedicated SQL server would be pretty high on your list of possible upgrades.

What kind of bandwidth do you think this amount of traffic would demand?

 

[Sketcher]

What kind of bandwidth do you think this amount of traffic would demand?

I don't know. A lot.